House music is a genre of dance music born in the nightclubs of Chicago and New York in the first half of the eighties and strongly influenced by disco music and elements of soul and funk of the late seventies.
The name house music comes from the Chicago Warehouse club, where resident DJ Frankie Knuckles first played house records in the mid-1980s. A second theory is also widespread, but without foundation, according to which the term "house" was born to indicate that that type of music can be recorded and produced "at home".
The origins
House music was born as a natural development of disco music.The pioneers of the new musical genre were the DJs Frankie Knuckles, Larry Levan and Nicky Siano, who in the early seventies from the console of the New York Gallery were the first to experiment new ways music such as "beat mixing", which consists in bringing two discs played consecutively at the same "time", and then passing from one to the other making the music continue without interruption.
Another important innovation of the Gallery was to use a console equipped with three platters: the first two used for the discs while the third allowed the insertion of effects and sounds chosen by the DJ in the songs.
In 1976 Levan decided to buy a garage at 84 King Street, and to start organizing dance evenings animated by his and Knucles' music. The garage was called the paradise garage and became one of the most important clubs in New Jork. Inside Levan and Knuckles further refined their skills as DJs, playing disco music sets characterized by a strong sexual and transgressive component.
In 1977 Knuckles moved to Chicago, becoming the Warehouse DJ. In the following years his way of mixing records with drum machine patterns, and soulful vocalizations gained more and more success and began to be imitated. The official birth of the genre can conventionally be traced back to 1984, when the record company Imports Etc of Chicago started selling records under the name of "house music". Among the first records released by the label, in addition to Your Love by the aforementioned Knuckles, we must also mention "On and On" by Jesse Saunders (the first official house record in history) and "Set It Off" by Walter Gibbons.
In 1986 Larry Heard launched "Can you feel it" (later published in 1988), which opened the deep house vein that Chicago was becoming the spokesperson for. Another of the historical names of the house of that period was Lil Louis, who in 1987 released French kiss, one of the greatest hits in the history of house music that earned him a record deal with Epic. Other big hits of those years were Steve Hurley's “Music is the key”, Marshall Jefferson's “Move your body” and Farley Jackmaster Funk's “Jack the bass”. Also in 1986, another Chicago disc-jockey DJ Pierre , invented "acid house", a type of house built around the rhythms of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. The first single of the new genre was in 1987 Acid Tracks by Phuture (of which DJ Pierre was a member), which was followed in 1988 by DJ Pierre's Dream Girl which will be the most successful single of acid.
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