-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
Published at 4:56pm
Sign up today!
While one end of the dance-music crowd hurtles forward via DJ blogs and dubious downloads, a lot of DJs, heads and party people we know are turning back the clock—interest in the early days of dance music has never been so intense. Native New Yorker Danny Krivit got together with a turntable in a club before disco was even a genre, and he’s been on the New York nightlife scene since 1970. In the last decade, Krivit’s Body & Soul weekly with François K and Joe Claussell was a Sunday mainstay. With so much going on in the Big Apple and abroad, Krivit has been scarce in Chicago. We called him in anticipation of his set at the recently launched BBR Monday Social.
Few, if any, living DJs can take the long view on the state of nightclubbing that Danny Krivit can. Krivit’s father owned the Greenwich Village jazz club Ninth Circle during the ’60s, where the young Krivit rubbed shoulders with the likes of Charles Mingus and John Lennon. Krivit began spinning there in the early ’70s—and he served as the resident at his father’s new disco, Ones, and his own after-hours space nearby. Krivit was a regular partier at the city’s seminal underground clubs—the Gallery, Limelight and the DJ mecca the Loft—where most agree the artistic side of the craft was first perfected. He roller-skated at the famed Paradise Garage during its heyday.
When he looks back on that mythic period in clubbing, he notices what’s missing in our current scene: “DJs, for the most part, were weaving messages and really taking you on a journey. People had the patience to go on a journey,” he says. “Clubs had the versatility to open up because they wanted to do something interesting and fun as opposed to selling bottles. And they could. There’s got to be so many more people out there now, but there are so little choices in comparison.”
Dance music history documentaries often feature Krivit as an expert source on that fertile era, but he’s picky about which ones he does. Currently, he’s excited about a filmmaker who’s “really talking about a history of clubs and dance in New York that evolved from the ’40s and ’50s to now.”
Krivit’s career has been over 35 years long—but it’s the disco age with which he’s most closely associated. And he says there’s a reason that disco wasn’t a flash in the pan. “People spent some time with it. They were already artists and accomplished musicians and they spent money in the studio and to put it out on vinyl and distribute it. There was a lot of thought in it. And it wasn’t like ‘Let’s do this quick thing.’ And it shows. It has a lot of substance.”
Krivit briefly stepped into the hip-hop world as the first resident DJ at the roller-disco-friendly Roxy where the founding fathers Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa played regularly. Throughout the ’80s and beyond, he was in demand both as a DJ and dance remixer. Krivit’s often epic edits, of everyone from MFSB to James Brown, remain essential additions to any deep DJ’s utility belt. Recently, his version of Lenny Williams’ “You Got Me Running” popped up on James Murphy and Pat Mahoney’s disco-loving Fabric mix disc.
Tellingly, he doesn’t remember the dance-music-crazy ’90s quite so fondly. “After the Garage, there really wasn’t anything that outdid it. The music scene was changing. I thought around 1990, with house music, it was going to take the next step, but it kinda dropped the ball.”
The vibe at Krivit’s current main party, the 718 Sessions, recalls those classic parties at the Loft and Garage (“except with more girls” our TONY Clubs editor tells us). Krivit has even thrown that party on a tour boat circling Manhattan. His sets aren’t complete throwbacks—he says he just wants to take the crowd somewhere special: “If they are really feeling it, I’m gonna go to a lot of places.”
Danny Krivit plays BBR Monday Social on Monday 31 at Vision.
