Mix masters

DJ auteurs Tenaglia and Vasquez

by Michael Freedberg

During the past three years a new dance-music genre has taken hold: the DJ remix CD, with the DJ as star performer. Combining his taste in selecting the various songs with his style of mixing them together, the DJ improvises -- in the manner of a jazz soloist -- his musical vision, his statement about joy, dreams, and loneliness.

Actually, disco DJs have always done this for the crowds who flock to their dance floor. What's new is the idea of DJs recording such "performances." It began during the second phase of the house-music era, the early '90s, when Brooklyn-based turntable soloists hawked bootleg tapes of their mixes on street corners. So well did these unauthorized tapes sell that house-oriented indie labels began to commission fully authorized mix CDs from well-known DJs. Not all clubland DJs were eager to cooperate: publicizing their style at such length, they thought, was like giving away the store to their competitors. But Todd Terry, Armand Van Helden, Danny Tenaglia, and Junior Vasquez were willing; and once these masters had established the DJ mix as a profitable venture, DJs as varied as Keoki, Laurent Garnier, Joey Beltram, and the Murk Boys were happy to follow suit.

The last necessary step to realizing in a commercial product the rapturously exhaustive length of a live dance-floor DJ mix was to market double-CD collections -- and this Danny Tenaglia, with Color Me Danny (Twisted), and Junior Vasquez, in Live (Pagoda), have now done. Tenaglia and Vasquez are both Brooklyn guys: It was at Brooklyn house parties that "mobile" jocks played the all-house music sets that were later sold on street corners.

Tenaglia's long set fully adheres to the sharp-styled raw edge of those house parties and to the funky jazz steps favored by the partygoers. Although his taste extends to the new-agey mirror-gazing Vanessa Daou ("Surrender Yourself," "Sunday Afternoons") and some Brit-dance (the Shamen's "mk2a," the Pet Shop Boys' "Before"), for the most part he prefers fierce soul divas like Susan Clark ("Deeper"), Oleta Adams ("Never Knew Love"), and Frankie Knuckles' Adeva ("Love Can Change It"). Or else he programs jazzy swing warblers like Kim Mazelle ("Love Me the Right Way"), Dajae ("U Got Me Up"), and Kimara ("Lovelace"). Chic, with their fast-stepping search for cheer, hors d'oeuvres, and pleasant aftertastes, would be right at home in Tenaglia's precise mixes.

Some DJs, in bridging from one song to another, up the volume, or complicate the musical foreground, so the dancer won't notice the song has changed. Not Tenaglia. He makes a minimum of hooky fuss, and he segues on the hi-hat, not the deep-house beat. Thus the deep-house beat, in Tenaglia's style, adds its force freshly to the music rather than constantly doing all the heavy lifting. Especially in the pairing of Adeva's "Love Can Change It" with Kimara's "Lovelace," or the Pets' "Before" with Tenaglia's own "Harmonica Track," you can hear him make beat and singer share the expressive load, so that they co-operate as equals in the search to make the right feeling last.

Unlike the working-stiff Tenaglia, Vasquez is a prima donna of the dance mix. Realism? Forget it. On Live, Vasquez's singers ride high on a magic carpet of deep, melodic beat -- house music's plushest. Tribal-percussion intros pour an exotic, jet-set champagne into vessels like Vicki Sue Robinson's "House of Joy" and Lydia Rhodes's appropriately titled "Live It Cool (Just Do It)." Television and gossip-mag icons k.d. lang ("If I Were You"), Cher ("One by One"), and Annie Lennox ("No More I Love Yous") take the spotlight as Vasquez drapes his gilded beatworks around them, cutting the music like cloth -- as if he were Gaultier, Estevez, or Lacroix.

In his thank-yous, Vasquez applauds "all those designers who help to make us look good." Do not be fooled. Being a fashion addict is commonplace in today's pop music, geared as it is to the image-centering of videos and to music mags bought and paid for by the sellers of faddy clothes. But in Vasquez's mix world of sumptuous narcissism -- Sonny Campbell's "Clear," Johnny Hanson's "Mr Fantasy," X-Pact's "Excess" -- the mirror narrowness and clothes materialism of big-city life is puffed up, rhythmically, beyond all reason, until it almost bursts. When in the set's closing cut, "I Am Thin and Gorgeous," the Ab Fab women go "You can never have enough hats, gloves, and shoes" -- summing up two hours of minked-up melodies and high-heeled egotism on display -- you know it's more to the point to giggle or guffaw than to cry, "You go, girl!"