A Larry Levan of swing?
Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2004 10:24 am
Larry Levan (1954?-1992) is widely considered to be the greatest DJ ever. I read an article that described his personality in detail. Below are some excerpts from the article, to illustrate.
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Kelvin Lewis, Jockey Slut Magazine (UK), 1998 wrote:For the 2000 regulars, Larry Levan was like a god. They even tagged his late-night sessions as "Saturday Mass." He did things with records that other DJs just didn't do. He would tell a story with his music. Sometimes sending the crowd crazy and minutes later making them break down and cry. There was, and still is, no DJ like him. He was an insanely talented genius, both behind the turntables and in the studio. And he made the Paradise Garage the legend that it is.
Kelvin Lewis, Jockey Slut Magazine (UK), 1998 wrote:"I've seen nights where everyone was rushing around to get things open and they'd forget something like cleaning the mirror-balls. It'd be one o'clock and Larry would run on to the dancefloor with a ladder to clean all six mirror-balls. The record would run out and everyone would be standing there, just waiting. Not booing, not mad, just waiting. And when he finished, he'd go up and put the next record on the people would go mad. They loved that. The fact that even though he was the DJ, he'd spend half an hour cleaning all the mirror-balls."
Is there such a swing DJ? While swing dancing, have you experienced moments like those? Would you like to be a swing DJ like that?Kelvin Lewis, Jockey Slut Magazine (UK), 1998 wrote:"He built sets with stories that went into one another," explains Kevorkian. "I'm not saying that he only played vocals, but there was a concept there that he studied and became an amazing practitioner of. He was able to truly use songs, and when I say songs, I mean songs. I'm, talking about songs with a voice speaking to you and inspiring you, sot some crappy sample repeating 175 times until you're made to feel like you're every bit as stupid because it has to be repeated that many times until you understand it. Songs with lyrics. And he used those lyrics to talk to people. It was very, very common for people on the dancfloor to fell like he was talking to them directly through the record. And was a two-way thing. Not just the DJ saying, 'Here is the law,' or the crowd saying, 'We'll only listen to this,' there was an unspoken mental energy flowing back and forth."
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