Dimitri From Paris - A bon vivant behind the decks

Music has always been an expression of the self, of one's own lifestyle, often transgressive and outside the lines. Artists are expected to be out-of-the-ordinary people, devoted to the pursuit of excess, to set them apart from ordinary folk. But the artist can rebel, can shape his audience and bend it to his will. Few manage to do so; it takes real personality. And then there are those who seek out and find a compromise. Those who partly conform and partly assert themselves. It's among the latter that we can place Dimitri From Paris.

Dimitri is a fascinating figure, a blend of different cultures and ethnicities, who found his way into high fashion and the refined drawing rooms of the world that matters, establishing himself globally as one of the biggest names of the glorious French Touch school. He is French only by adoption. As his exotic name suggests, Dimitri (surname unknown) hails from the Aegean, in Turkey, but moved to the City of Light at the age of three, and stayed there for good.

He entered the world of music in the late Eighties, sketching out funk rhythms and making remixes of French hits in the spare time left to him by his job at French Radio 7. But the night is his true territory, and he begins to make a name for himself, gaining experience in clubs. Something about the sound, however, doesn't convince him... by his own admission, the 80s funk he's dishing out depresses every girlfriend he has. So Dimitri decides to seek out a more personal path, digs up old records from the French tradition of the Fifties and Sixties and samples them with old-fashioned-sounding jingles, drowning them in a patina of light house music of his own making. Delicate retro rhythms, understated backdrops that wink at high society. His work moves onto the catwalks, with Chanel asking him for original tracks for its shows in the first half of the Nineties.

It's underground work, carefully cultivated by Dimitri in his spare moments.

Then, in 1996, he decides to unleash the whole body of mixing work he'd built up in fashion's salons, releasing his debut album, Sacrebleu, the ultimate expression of this interplay between old French slogans, 1930s music boxes and jazzy sketches of a new kind of chill-out.

Somewhere between Café del Mar and Jacques Brel, a wonderful and entertaining album takes shape, built from soft, velvety, international sounds. Some tracks stick to more straightforwardly house coordinates, like "Free Ton Style", while others fully revive the stylistic devices of the old-time chansonniers, carrying them into the new millennium ("Un Woman's Paradise").

Sacrebleu is a global record, ranging from tropical rhythms ("Une Very Stilish Fille", "Le Ryhtme et la Cadence", "Sacre Francaise") to touches of trip-hop ("Reveries", various interludes), while always keeping that exquisitely French taste for rhythms that are soft and chic, yet vigorous in their stride. High-class music, refined moods, breathed in deeply on the album's key tracks, like the hugely famous "Souvenirs De Paris", and in the cruise-ship crooner voices that pop up here and there as a surprise, welcoming as a casino usher.

This is one of the most important chapters in the new course of French music, the birth and worldwide spread of a scene that encompasses every kind of sound close to chill-out, but in which the disc jockey brings his own origins, his own touch, his own French Touch. A pervasive nationalism, yet never overbearing, one to be asserted on every level. From here on, Dimitri "from Paris" closes out the album with a lovely rendition of the Marseillaise, adding in the film sample "Ah, Paris c'est la toujours Paris!". All that's missing is the tricolour flag.

The following year Dimitri tries his hand at the first of the many mix albums that would come to define his career. In doing so he also establishes himself as a disc jockey, thanks to one of the best selections of his career, leaning decisively towards more house-oriented sounds and setting aside somewhat the chill-out Frenchisms that had taken centre stage on his debut album. Mounsier Dimitri's De-Luxe House Of Funk opens, in fact, by striking a compromise, namely with a far more rhythmic remix of one of the biggest hit singles taken from Sacrebleu, "Free Ton Style", and continues with tracks from Bob Sinclair, Teddy G, and above all a very distinctive remix of "Isobel" by Bjork, in which Dimitri overhauls the Icelandic chanteuse's original version, turning it into a tribal-house track made visionary and dreamlike by the voice of the Reykjavik elf.

The Parisian begins to be in demand with a certain kind of clientele, and before long he's curating the musical selections for high-fashion runway shows. Dior, Fendi, Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier, Yves Saint-Laurent. He's always there, amid cocktail parties and beautiful women. The association with the parties thrown by Hugh Hefner, the all-powerful founder of Playboy magazine, who brings Dimitri on board for his parties, feels almost inevitable. Immersed up to his neck in his natural habitat of trendy venues and classy outfits, the Frenchman gives his very best. The result is a thrilling selection, put together for a memorable evening and immortalised on a new album, A Night At The Playboy Mansion, where, slotted in perfectly among the usual house-tropical rhythms, 70s disco and its revival also make an appearance ("Down To Love Town"). The sounds keep moving away from the old formula, looking now to Brazil ("Outro Lugar"), now to the nights of Tokyo, Dimitri's secret obsession, a devotee of Eastern culture as he is.

Thanks to "Playboy Mansion", Dimitri becomes a celebrity, one of the most important names of the late-90s French school, the lounge-house figurehead of a scene that also saw the success of St. Germain, Daft Punk, Air, Llorca, Etienne De Crecy, Cassius, Les Rhythmes Digitales.

Not particularly notable is Disco Forever (2000) — perhaps only the cover art is worth mentioning! — still focused on rediscovering sounds typical of the Seventies, while the project the disc jockey puts out two years later is a more ambitious one: a double compilation, once again drawing inspiration from the sets Dimitri played in the bunny den. On After The Playboy Mansion we find one tracklist that's livelier, suited to the kind of dancefloor moves he's accustomed us to, and another leaning more towards chill, ideal for a cocktail-hour aperitivo. Here too the result is highly satisfying, the average quality of the tracks is extremely high, ranging from remixes firmly aimed at the hard-house of Danny Tenaglia and Tiefschwarz to the fantastic jazz happening of Llorca and his "Indigo Blues". A selection for all tastes, in short, and it really does seem that the world of Playboy can't distract Dimitri from his sonic research and his meticulous attention to detail. "I've got about fifteen thousand records, but when I'm with my girlfriend I never listen to work stuff. I'm crazy about Burt Bacharach and Henry Mancini", declares the Parisian with that ladies'-man smirk of his.

In 2003 Dimitri returns with a new album of original material, seven years on from Sacrebleu. Since then, the disc jockey's sound has been heavily influenced by his already-mentioned passion for Japan and for the quality music the Land of the Rising Sun is so hungry for. The ferment of the Japanese scene pushes Dimitri to centre Cruising Attitude on very refined, light rhythms, drawing heavily on evergreen hits and reworking them in a lounge key. The album is a concept piece about flying, specifically about the flight from Paris to Tokyo: sweet melodies from the land of the lotus flower, where Dimitri has forged plenty of friendships, reflected in the recording sessions. It feels like listening to early David Sylvian when we come across "Okinawa Love", where an echo of "The Girl From Ipanema" also surfaces. With a similarly almond-eyed flavour is the syrupy "Merumo", though the usual tropicalisms and cartoon theme tunes also find fertile ground here.

Cruising Attitude is an album that has very little to do with house music, as shown by the collaborations with the chill-jazz ensemble Pink Martini, or with mannered vocalists like Victor Davies.

Riding the wave of success, Dimitri couldn't stop, moving once again into the territory of deep house compilations. A key moment in this field was his collaboration with Joey Negro, another highly sought-after selector of the tropical house scene. 2004 saw him touring the world's best clubs (though he kept himself to around 60 sets a year, relatively few) to serve up his menu. Having definitively shifted to more rhythmic territory, he was called in by the prestigious Defected label to curate the new (triple) volume of In The House. A somewhat pretentious project, hard to swallow in one sitting, for a series clearly running low on ideas and names. Our man sensed the shifting winds and latched onto the emerging SuSu label and the new Southport Weekender compilation. After Joey Negro, Blaze and Miguel Migs, Dimitri is the artist the label is betting on. His selection returns to an old favourite of the Frenchman's: 70s disco and its carefree basslines. It's not a particularly thrilling work, but it does shine a light on a track that had been somewhat overlooked. "Corps a Corps" by Claude Monnet is perhaps the single Dimitri had always wanted to write, with that deeply sensual, retro-tinged voice immersed in a driving house rhythm. Picture Audrey Hepburn behind the wheel of a Maserati, cruising round the curves of the Costa Smeralda, a scarf wrapped around her face...

Every Dimitri compilation has its own distinctive trait, and so Super Disco Friends (a double selection alongside DJ Muro) is an ideal synthesis of funk, soul and disco. Something of a return to the Parisian's roots and old passions. Track after track, this sparkling, retro mix album turns out to be perhaps one of Dimitri's best since the days of Playboy Mansion. Velvety and sensual in sound is the triple In The House Of Love, a balanced mix of deep house and chill-out. Amanda Lear would have found her "love cocktail" right here.

Our man, however, has lost a bit of the verve of his early days, settling into a sound that seems to have already said everything it had to say. In what he does, Dimitri is probably still the best, but the genre is starting to sound a little stale. Yet the influence his melting-pot of sounds and cultures had on French music at the turn of the millennium remains undeniable. Dimitri rehabilitated a musical genre, the old-fashioned French chanson, winning it back a place on the dancefloor. He gave a radical makeover to sounds and melodies that seemed forever locked away in old drawing rooms and on cruise ships, managing never to lose the innate charm these tracks carry with them. High-end house, strictly for VIPs, some have accused him. But in the end, who is really harmed by a disc-jockey who sails through high society with such natural ease?

Marilyn Monroe used to say "I never go to bed without a drop of Chanel No. 5." If she were still with us today, she'd probably be listening to Dimitri From Paris.

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