The prelude to catching a flight is often a tedious and useless moment. A couple of years ago, those waiting in the uncomfortable chairs at Malta Airport had the unexpected company of the forceful sound of a melodious and robust song played on the piano. A big guy with a cap and dressed in black had decided to hit hard one of those keyboards that are sometimes placed in shopping centers and other transit spaces. The video spread like wildfire on TikTok. No wonder: one of the fathers of music was at the piano houseKerri Chandler (East Orange, New Jersey, 1969), on the Olympus of the genre alongside Theo Parrish, Derrick Carter and Frankie Knuckles.
“That piano sounded very bad,” says, laughing, the protagonist of the vertical video in question, who at 54 years old and after three decades producing and touring the world, still continues on his almost prophetic mission of “seeking to make the “People’s lives a little better.” One need not have ever been to an electronic music club to appreciate the beauty and emotion in Chandler’s songs. ‘Rain’, released in 1998, is his most popular song. It is an enveloping song of almost eight minutes that immerses the listener in a state of happy melancholy. From the first minute, the groove The bass becomes more present and it is now impossible not to get carried away. Mind and body rocked by an ambiguous lyric that we do not know if it talks about love or is a reflection on its impossibility. You’re dancing, but you may even have shed a tear. “I understand that it is not common to find dance songs with deep and emotional content, but all my music is like that. Behind every song there is a true story behind it, something I had to deal with. “It’s like going to therapy,” she says.
Son of Joseph, a respected DJ of the 70s and 80s on the New Jersey scene, from whom he inherited an impressive collection of music (from The Dells to Roy Ayers, through Quincy Jones and Coltrane), Chandler began playing records on a club at the age of 13 under the name DJ Little Man. At that age he bought his first equipment and began producing. It was released in 1991, with the EP Super Lover/Get It Off, where he already showed an innate ability to achieve powerful and clear sounds. Of course, there was a true story behind it: the murder and rape of his then-girlfriend at the club where he was a resident. “My father took me to his sessions at the club. The best advice he gave me was to always have clean and immaculate equipment. And I follow it to the letter. He also asked me to never take drugs. And I also fulfill it. He told me one day, while he was high, that drugs destroy everything,” he confesses on the phone from Amsterdam. He died in 2016, and he pays tribute to him in Dad Giveaway, compilation of 73 songs (one for each year that his father would turn) and that can be downloaded for free on Bandcamp, a listening format very different from that of the origins of the house.
“My father asked me to never take drugs. He told me one day, while he was high, that drugs destroy everything.”
Let’s make history. In early 1977, a young Frankie Knuckles moved from New York to Chicago, the birthplace of the genre, to accept the position of DJ at a new club, The Warehouse. “About 2,000 hedonists, most of them gay and black, danced from midnight on Saturday to noon on Sunday,” according to Simon Reynolds in the book Energy Flash (1998). Knuckles began experimenting and editing disco cuts on a tape recorder, adapting and combining the raw material. Later, Knuckles would use a live drum machine to reinforce the mixes. He would soon evolve into the sound of housethat is, a forceful four-by-four bass drum, with seductive percussions and loops of deep bass, and then, in what became like deep house, melodious voices.
Precisely, the show that Chandler will offer at Sónar tries to reflect “how this sound is made.” To do this, she will bring her collection of open reel tapes from house, funk and disco on stage, an experience he describes as “juggling knives.” He has always liked to make music with his hands, physically touching objects. “CDs always seemed like disposable objects to me,” she will confess. With the support of nightclub owners and engineers, in 2023 he released his latest album, Spaces & Places, the first in 14 years, recorded in twenty-four emblematic nightclubs: from the Ministry of Sound in London, to the Rex in Paris, the Watergate in Berlin and the Razzmatazz in Barcelona.
When we ask him if he would prefer to DJ in a booth separated from people, like Larry Heard and other pioneers of the genre – he once got very angry with someone in the audience when they asked him to play a David Guetta song at a session in Paris – he answers That much better with the people, at the foot of the track. “Before a session, I like to walk through the city, through the streets, say hello at the entrance of the club and watch them dance,” he adds, remembering that in the essence of music house There is always a collective approach, talking about the good night (or morning) experienced, and not about the DJ. A good lesson for narcissistic times.
Kerri Chandler
Spaces & Places
Kaoz Theory
![Self-released album Dad Giveaway](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/2MPNVV6Z2ZGD5MD2OCUX5LWMCU.jpg?auth=c3886dba01803832162087ae4d406d9af1cff7589f5e362a42d755f1c50b550c&width=414&height=414&smart=true)
Kerri Chandler
Dad Giveaway
Self-published
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