Frankie Knuckles - The Godfather of House Music

Frankie Knuckles was born in the South Bronx, New York City, on January 18, 1955. He spent his youth in the outskirts of NY, witnessing the social upheavals of the era, and in the meantime, thanks to his sister's jazz and soul records, developed a passion for Black music.

He attended Costume Design school, but in '71, at just 16 years old, he was already working as a DJ at a New York club: Better Days, where every Monday and Thursday he spun records alongside Tee Scott. Knuckles' musical selections consisted mainly of the Black music of the era: jazz, soul, funk, rhythm'n'blues.

Having stood out for the quality of his musical selections, he was called in '72 to work at a New York club that would become legendary: the Gallery, located in Soho, Manhattan. At the Gallery, Knuckles shared the booth with two other DJs: Niky Siano and Larry Levan. Together, the three of them gave birth to a new technique for playing records: "mixing". Tracks were thus blended together, matched to the same beats per minute, so the music flowed without interruption. It was the first time this had happened in a club. Another innovation at the Gallery was a booth equipped with three turntables: the third was used to add effects and sounds while mixing two records.

His experience with Larry Levan would prove fundamental for Knuckles, leading him to play alongside him again at another legendary club: the Paradise Garage. At the time, the Paradise Garage was the cradle of the 70s disco music movement, frequented by New York's aspiring "Tony Maneros". It became the place where Levan and Knuckles experimented with the first DJ sets, crafting disco music sessions marked by a strong sexual and transgressive edge.

The booth was transformed from a place of uncritical, haphazard selections into a veritable "pulpit"; an now indispensable medium through which the DJ/artist, as an ever-evolving and attentive curator, spread a message, a way of being. A new way of listening, playing, but above all, of "living the music".

Once his time at the Paradise Garage came to an end, Knuckles left the City in '77 and moved to Chicago, where, in March of that year, he became the resident DJ of a club destined to go down in history: the Warehouse. These were the years of punk, of social unrest, of the dispossessed, of the "different", of counterculture, of destruction as a way of life. The audience Knuckles now faced was profoundly different: no longer the dancers of disco music, but listeners for whom music was a means of escaping daily life, from that existential unease which had become the leitmotif of those years. It was this audience that pushed Knuckles to change his sets, to search for something new, something that would shake the crowd.

Knuckles focused on the electronic experimentation that was very much in vogue at the time, using it to contaminate his sets and the music that had characterized his selections up to that point; he manipulated records, with only an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to help him, and made home re-edits of the most beloved soul tracks of the moment, simply isolating the rhythmic breaks and assembling them into endless, repeated sequences, a hypnotic rhythmic loop. Knuckles reinvented the black music he had grown up with, reworking jazz, soul, funk and disco tracks, but also old gospel numbers, loading them with electronic beats, synthesizer carpets that evoked old blues, distorted and futuristic vocals: past and future met and merged, and the "kick drum" was born.

Knuckles drew on his experience at the Gallery to introduce these experiments into his dj sets, connecting the tape recorder to the mixer and blending the tracks he was playing with the beats he'd made beforehand, thus achieving a completely new sound, tied to the sweet melodies of the past but charged with harsh, disarming electronics. This is how the concept of the mix, of extended playing, came about - but above all, it's how the DJ was definitively transformed from a mere selector (a human jukebox, as they were then called) into an artist, a "non-musician" (as Brian Eno would have put it), who used turntables and mixer as if they were genuine musical instruments, capable of solos and melodic digressions.

The result is a hypnotic, repetitive, passionate and disarming dj set, ranging with ease from ancestral Africa to Delta blues - the work of a DJ who radically transforms every possible sound source that passes through his mixer. It was during one of the Warehouse parties that the announcer called this music "house music", as a contraction of the club's name. The revolution had officially begun, and it would prove to be a raging river capable of changing the world.

Knuckles wasn't just a DJ; he also devoted himself to producing tracks and remixes. Many artists, after hearing his musical constructions, would ask him to remix their songs. In '82 came his first remix, for a First Choice track, "Let No Man Put Asunder", but it was in '84 that he left the world a testament to the revolution underway, with the release of his first single, "Your Love", a track that would become legendary.

"Your Love" is the perfect distillation of Knuckles's work in his Warehouse days: it opens with a hypnotic synth loop, a sound reminiscent of early video games, which is gradually enriched by an electronic bassline, a steady pulse... the essence of life itself: the heartbeat. It's passion that always drives the vocal, slipping sensually through the coils of the rhythm, a sighed, inviting entrance, a voice and melodic line that fuse perfectly with the electronic bed beneath them, rising in volume until it breaks into a cry of desire, a kind of erotic trance. "Your Love" is one of the pillars of the past on which today's house music rests, a track in which you can find much of what came after, an endless source of imitations, ideas, influences and legends; the song's intro, with its synth loop and entrance of the bassline, would become a classic device in countless house productions.

Knuckles, known by then as "The Godfather of House", was invited to play in the biggest American clubs, from Chicago to New York. He had turned the mixer and dancing into a way of life, an art form. Of his dj sets, Marshall Jefferson would say: "Frankie was a deity. He'd take an old Philadelphia Soul record and turn it into an anthem. He just had to drop a record and the crowd would be in perfect sync with his mind and his soul."

In '89 he founded a record label with David Morales, Def Mix Records, which remains to this day a benchmark and launching pad for countless dance artists.

After many years of singles and remixes, in '91 he produced his first album: Beyond The Mix. The album opens with "Godfather", a kind of self-celebration of the myth, marked by gospel vocal inserts laid over a beat built on an obsessive crash. The album goes on to unwind between soul mid-tempos and fragments of '80s beat. It's worth stressing the historical importance it held at the time, particularly with regard to spreading the house sound into mainstream circuits. It can also still be appreciated as a snapshot of an era and of the musical developments still to come, a melancholy instant capture of the atmospheres of underground dance music. The album also contains a track that would go down in the history of "club culture", "The Whistle Song". The piece is built on a melancholy keyboard-and-horns melody, almost an ideal soundtrack for the end of a great party, when the crowd leaves the club and all that's left is an empty room, a representation of what has just taken place. This track would be a crucial piece in the evolution, and above all the emancipation, of "club culture", helped along by repeated airplay on MTV and countless mainstream radio stations.

House was starting to no longer be an underground phenomenon, and was poised to infect the entire world. "The Whistle Song", thanks to its pop charge, would become a cornerstone in the spread of "club culture", imitated and sampled by entire generations of future artists - not least Bob Sinclair, who borrowed its central melody for his "Love Generation". But as sometimes happens with "classics", to a listener today this album would also sound heavily dated, especially due to sonics that are largely outmoded and the repetitiveness of its rhythmic structure.

Knuckles would try the album format again with Welcome To The Real World in '95, and A New Reality in 2004.

In the first case, we hear an album that isn't able to sustain emotional tension throughout its entire runtime; the class with which Knuckles approaches his tracks is always evident, but there are plenty of weak points, many superfluous and repetitive songs, even if marked by pleasant melodies. Still, we find some very solid singles that would become dancefloor classics, such as "Too Many Fish", featured on Welcome To The Real World.

On A New Reality, by contrast, Knuckles shows he's still able to churn out considerable dance hits. After a brief intro, the album officially kicks off the dancing with "Hit The Floor", marked by a hysterical, obsessive vocal line, driven on by a claustrophobic rhythm. Next comes "Bac N Day", a classic, functional house track built on a keyboard-and-horns interplay, accompanied by warm sighs. The album seems to play on the past, with the use of "funky" keyboards and horns that recall soul. We often find choirs reminiscent of the gospel music so dear to Knuckles, as in the track "Matter Of Time", built entirely on vocal interplay. Also rooted in the past are the jazz inserts we hear in "Keep On Moving", a reworking of one of his older tracks, with a guitar that delights in climbing ever-changing melodies, creating a sweet, dreamy atmosphere. Overall, the album won't make anyone shout masterpiece, especially among newer generations of "clubbers", but it still demonstrates the class with which Knuckles approaches his tracks, leaving us with a sensual, delicate work.

Looking at Knuckles's output, it's clear he was far more at ease with the "single" format. Many of Knuckles's singles are classics and reference points for the club world. Besides the already mentioned "Your Love", there's "Baby Wants To Ride", a collaboration with Jamie Principle, in which we find more than a few hints of the electro sound that dominates clubs today; moreover, the track's atmosphere would prove important in defining the sound of underground, a house subgenre. Another important single is the gorgeous "Tears", on which Knuckles collaborated with Satoshi Tomiie, bringing him to the attention of a wider audience.

There are also numerous remixes - reportedly more than two hundred - all commissioned by top-tier artists such as Michael Jackson, Diana Ross and many others. Special mention goes to the many compilations on the early years of house that Knuckles curated, which made it possible to rediscover tracks symbolic of an era and a movement in its most legendary years. Worth noting are "The Godfather Of House Music: Trax Classic" and "Choice: A Collection Of Classic".

On August 25, 2004, the street where the Warehouse stands in Chicago was named in his honor: "Honorary Frankie Knuckles Way".

Frankie Knuckles kept “playing records” practically until the end of his life, despite having a foot amputated due to diabetes, with the same energy and passion as his earliest parties. His dj sets were always in high demand, an unparalleled emotional experience, a musical testimony to history. It's precisely in these sets and in his singles that we find Knuckles' fundamental importance to music; the importance of a man who changed the way dancing itself was understood: no longer a means of taking part in trendy, high-society events as it had been with disco, but the ultimate purpose of a generation, a cornerstone of a way of life that was not only musical but, above all, social.

Every innovation and experiment happening in dance music today rests on the foundations Knuckles laid down in 1977, and on that simple reel-to-reel tape recorder.

On March 31, 2014, Knuckles sadly passed away at the age of 59, unable to overcome his illness. His death, however, became another moment of profound shared grief for an entire musical movement, manifesting itself in countless tweets, letters, articles, and tributes in his honor. A demonstration, spanning generations, of the impact this easygoing man had on music and, by extension, on the lives of many people and the careers of numerous dance artists, effectively making him an immortal legend.

Put together shortly before his death, House Masters Frankie Knuckles finally saw the light of day in 2015 on Defected. A collection of 22 tracks retracing some of the most celebrated moments of his career, it immediately stands out as recommended listening for everyone, whether longtime fans or newcomers looking for a starting point to dive into the vast undergrowth of his output (and, by extension, into the world of house).

Contributions by Damiano Pandolfini (“House Masters Frankie Knuckles”)

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