Various - The Very Best Of Easy Street Volume 1

, Aug 31, 2005

EASY STREET RECORDS, which opened up shop in 1983 under the co-ownership of Mike Gusick and Bob Kreizal, has been an outlet not so much for a particular sound as for a place - mid-Eighties New York, where young producers experiment with club sounds, working both underground and overground in a city where dance music is pop music.
In the cradle of dance, club records act pretty much the way they always have: every week, young DJs check in at the record pools and throng the local specialist stores, in search of hat new records. In a weekend, word of mouth can spread about a record; within a couple of weeks, DJs know exactly what it is about a record or a sang that dancers like.
And so do the producers who hang out at the clubs and provide the evening's rhythms and music. For five years, Easy Street has made a business of bringing out a range of dub music. Some of it has the unmistakable scent of sweatand early morning; some is unabashedly pop.
"You Don't Know", by SERIOUS INTENTION, produced by Paul Simpson, epitomizes the New York feel: the wide, comfortable beat, descended from the Philly dassic "Love Is the Message", is quintessential, but updated with high-tech electronic arrangements and sound effects. The human element was provided by the talented writer/singer Anthony Malloy. DJs all but voted a remix-by-committee: after hearing the "Oh-oh-oh" hook worked endlessly in clubs, Simpson took the original tracks back to the studio and created the remix included here, which played and sold steadily here and abroad for over a year. CULTURAL VIBE's "Ma Foom Bey", another long-running club classic, included here in its instrumental "Rhythm" version, is even more penetrating on a certain level, with a powerfully pulsating minimal groove that follows the beat into a place deep in the mind, where body and soul merge. Vocals, on the "Love Chant" mix, recalled Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa", although the same voice, in the last version an the 12-inch single, wished Zanzibar DJ and studio editor Tony Humphries a happy birthday.
Brooklyn quartet WORLD PREMIERE's "Share The Night" clearly shows dance music's roots in R, along with its propensity for demanding more: notice how the groove suddenly deepens immediately after the first couple of verses, with the remainder of the cut staged by Jonathan Fearing as a spacious backdrop for the group's harmonies and the overdubbed keyboards of Fred Zarr. HOT STREAK's "Body Work" was a similar exercise, in a more pop-oriented context, although at its release in mid-1983, no one would have described it as such. But laterthat year, the writing and production collaborators involved - Curtis Hudson, Lisa Stevens and John "Jellybean" Benitez - would prove it by delivering Madonna's first radio hit, "Holiday".
"Go Deh Yaka", by the Jamaican-born Brooklyn band MONYAKA, has to be among the more effective fusions of reggae with dance music production values, provided by John Morales & Sergio Munzibai's remix treatment. That was only fair, considering the massive contribution of Jamaican "dub" technique to dance music. Finally, "Aint Got Time", a tasty undiscovered 1980 duet by FREDDIE JACKSON & EDNAH HOLT - he needing no introduction if you just look at the No. 1 position an the R album charts; she best known for her late-70's records anD West End and touring stint in Talking Heads' big-band funk encourage - brings the set to a close and an appropriate note of unexpected pleasure.
There isn't necessarily a thread holding these tracks together, except that they were all major club hits and are still in demand by DJs and audiences - hence this compilation. Think of this collection as a collage: episodes, if you will, in a continuing series of memorable moments on the dance floor, brought to you by Easy Street Records.
Brian Chin Billboard Magazine - June, 1987

Was the above review useful to you? Yes  No  (report)