Paradise Garage

New York took the same impulse somewhere else: warmer, more gospel, built on a voice. David Mancuso's Loft was a private party in his own home; Larry Levan's Paradise Garage ran ten years on King Street and is still the room every club is measured against. The lineage runs through Salsoul, through Loleatta Holloway and Taana Gardner, out into the vocal house that most people picture when they picture the genre. Almost none of it was photographed by anyone who licensed the results freely, so this facet lives on the records, the sets and the people who kept telling the story.

Part of House Music

135 moments in this segment.

1976 - Double Exposure - Ten Percent (Walter Gibbons 12" Mix). Salsoul's 1976 release, widely cited as the first commercially available 12-inch single, and more importantly the record that put a DJ's re-edit on the label as the main event. Walter Gibbons stretched a three-minute Philadelphia soul record to nearly ten so it would work on a dancefloor. Everything about how house records are built starts here.
1976 - The Salsoul Orchestra - Nice 'N' Naasty (Walter Gibbons 12" Mix). Vince Montana's Philadelphia session players cut for the New York dancefloor, in Walter Gibbons's extended mix. Salsoul, founded in 1974 by the Cayre brothers, is the label whose catalogue the Loft and the Garage ran on and which house producers sampled for the next twenty years. A record made for DJs before that was an industry.
1977 - First Choice - Let No Man Put Asunder. The original album cut from Delusions on Salsoul, before the remixes turned it into an anthem at the Paradise Garage and the Warehouse. First Choice were a Philadelphia vocal group whose records DJs in New York and Chicago rebuilt the dancefloor around. This is the source recording that everything later was cut from.
1979 - Larry Levan live at the Paradise Garage, 1979. Ninety minutes of Levan in the Garage's second year, fully tracklisted, Ashford & Simpson, T-Connection, Stephanie Mills, on a Richard Long system that François Kevorkian called a temple of music. This is disco being turned into something else in real time, several years before anyone called it house. The best-documented copy of the 1979 tape.
1980 - Zebra - Paradise Garage, 1980. A short piece of audio circulated as Paradise Garage material from 1980, the club's third year at 84 King Street and Larry Levan's. It is kept because the garage facet has almost no surviving video or audio of any kind, and even weakly attributed artefacts are part of what remains.
1980 - Loleatta Holloway - Love Sensation (12" Mix). Written and produced by Dan Hartman for Salsoul in 1980, and the single most consequential vocal in dance music: Holloway's take was lifted without credit for Black Box's "Ride on Time" in 1989, and she spent years fighting for payment because the label, not the singer, owned the master. The full 12-inch is the version that lived in the Garage and in every record bag after it. Holloway died in 2011.
1980 - Loleatta Holloway - Love Sensation. The full Gold Mind/Salsoul version of the vocal that became the most-sampled voice in house, lifted wholesale into Black Box's 'Ride on Time' and a hundred records after it. Written and produced by Dan Hartman for a gospel-trained singer out of Chicago. This is the template for the female vocal that garage house was built on.
1981 - Taana Gardner - Heartbeat (12" Club Version). West End's slow-motion ten-minute 12-inch, mixed by Larry Levan and played at the Paradise Garage until the floor learned to move at under 100 BPM. Kenton Nix's rhythm track and Gardner's flat, unhurried vocal made a dance record out of almost nothing. It is the proof that Levan's room had its own tempo and its own idea of what a club record could be.
1982 - Peech Boys - Don't Make Me Wait. Larry Levan's own production with the NYC Peech Boys: dub space, gated drums and a gospel-derived vocal, the first record that sounds like the Paradise Garage rather than like disco. Blues & Soul traces the garage sound itself back to this record and to Boyd Jarvis. Posted here by West End, the label that released it.
1982 - Gwen Guthrie - It Should Have Been You (Larry Levan Mix). Guthrie's debut single for Island, produced by Sly and Robbie and mixed for the club by Larry Levan. A long-serving backing singer stepping out front, with the Paradise Garage's resident DJ deciding what the 12-inch should do. The Levan mix, not the album cut, is the version the New York floor knew.
1983 - First Choice - Let No Man Put Asunder (Frankie Knuckles 12" Remix). Frankie Knuckles' extended remix, the version that made the record a standard on both floors. It is the clearest single artifact of the traffic between Chicago and New York: a Salsoul vocal rebuilt by the DJ who defined the Warehouse sound. Eight minutes of drums, break and voice, arranged for a DJ rather than a radio.
1983 - Gwen Guthrie - Padlock (Larry Levan Mix). Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare's reggae rhythm track, remixed by Larry Levan for the Padlock EP on Garage Records. Guthrie's voice over a Jamaican bassline, stretched to seven minutes, is one of the strangest and most durable things ever played at the Paradise Garage. It is also the record that shows how far outside disco Levan was willing to reach.
1984 - The Tube reports from New York's clubs, 1983-84. A segment from Channel 4's The Tube, with Jools Holland and Leslie Ash touring the New York clubs just as dance music was becoming its own scene rather than disco's afterlife. It is one of the few pieces of moving footage of these rooms from the period, which matters because the garage lineage - the Loft, the Paradise Garage, the Jersey clubs - is almost entirely undocumented on film.
1985 - Larry Levan live at the Paradise Garage, 1985. Two hours of Levan playing the Garage's Richard Long system at the height of his residency, the New York room that ran on gospel-rooted vocals and a mostly Black and Latino gay membership. Recordings like this are the only surviving record of a club that was never photographed properly.
1986 - Larry Levan live at the Paradise Garage, 1986-87. A second two-hour Garage tape from the club's final period, distinct from the 1985 recording. The programming shows Levan's late style, longer records and heavier dub treatment of vocal house.
1986 - Blaze - Whatcha Gonna Do. The record that announced Blaze - Kevin Hedge, Josh Milan and Chris Herbert out of Newark - on their own Quark label. Deep, church-schooled vocal house made in New Jersey while Chicago was getting the headlines, and one of the founding documents of what the garage facet actually sounds like.
1987 - CeCe Rogers - Someday. The keystone gospel-house record, produced by Marshall Jefferson and released on Atlantic in 1987. Rogers sings it as a civil-rights sermon, 'there'll be no more hunger, no more hate', and it became the definitive statement of the vocal/gospel lineage that ran through the New York rooms rather than the Chicago ones.
1987 - CeCe Rogers - Someday (12" Club Mix). The full club mix of the gospel-house record that gave the music its social conscience: "the world is cold and times are bad", sung straight over a Marshall Jefferson production. It became an anthem in the New York and New Jersey rooms, the Garage, Zanzibar, where the vocal lineage of house lived. This is the extended 12-inch, the version DJs actually played.
1987 - Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage, 1987. Nearly five hours of Levan at 84 King Street in the club's final year, the closest thing that exists to sitting in that room. The Garage was members-only and served no liquor, which is exactly why it had no closing time and why the DJ set could become an art form. Levan's audience was overwhelmingly Black, Latino and gay, in a room that existed because they were not welcome elsewhere.
1987 - The Final Night in Paradise - Paradise Garage closing party footage. Previously unseen split-screen video from the Paradise Garage's closing party, the 48-hour goodbye held before the lease ran out on 1 October 1987. It is the only substantial moving image of that room full of people. Boiler Room released it with a new soundtrack by DJ Harvey.
1987-09-26 - Larry Levan: the last night at the Paradise Garage. Three and a half hours from the closing party at 84 King Street, the end of a residency that had run since the club opened in January 1978. The lease expired that autumn and the membership had nowhere comparable to go.
1987-09-26 - Larry Levan's closing set at the Paradise Garage. Two and a half hours from the last weekend at 84 King Street, September 1987, the end of a ten-year residency and of the club that named a genre. Levan died five years later, aged 38. This is the sound of the room shutting.
1988-05-03 - Tony Humphries live at Club Zanzibar, Newark - 3 May 1988. A 1988 Zanzibar tape from a year when Humphries was simultaneously the club's resident and the voice of Kiss FM's mastermix, moving records from a Black and Latino dancefloor in Newark onto New York radio. Forty minutes of the vocal-led sound that defined the East Coast alternative to Chicago.
1988 - Royal House - Can You Party (Club Mix). Todd Terry under the Royal House alias, cutting Chicago's 'Can You Feel It' and a stack of breaks into six minutes of New York sample house. It is the moment house stopped being played on machines alone and started being assembled out of other records. Terry's method came straight from hip-hop, made in the same boroughs.
1989 - Ten City - That's The Way Love Is (Underground Mix). Byron Stingily's falsetto over a Marshall Jefferson production, remixed by Steve Silk Hurley and released on Atlantic in 1989. Made in Chicago but written straight out of the New York vocal and gospel lineage the Paradise Garage built, it is the record that proved house could carry a real singer without losing the floor.
1989 - Frankie Knuckles pres. Satoshi Tomiie feat. Robert Owens - Tears. A New York record, not a Chicago one: Knuckles had moved east and formed Def Mix with David Morales, and Tears is what happened when Chicago's best vocalist met the plush, string-led production the city of the Paradise Garage had taught him. It is the single clearest bridge between the two scenes this archive covers.
1989-07-21 - Tony Humphries live at Club Zanzibar, Newark - 21 July 1989. An hour of Tony Humphries on his home floor at Zanzibar in Newark, the New Jersey room that carried the garage sound after the Paradise Garage closed. Humphries' blend of gospel-rooted vocals and hard percussive tracks is the template later called Jersey garage. Recorded from the night itself, not a studio mix.
1990 - Dream 2 Science - Mystery of Love. Not the Larry Heard record of the same name, this is Ben Cenac's Dream 2 Science, a Brooklyn deep-house project working in the drifting, keyboard-led idiom that New York produced after the Paradise Garage closed. Kept because free-licensed material from this scene does not exist and recorded sound is the only surviving trace of it.
1990 - Frankie Knuckles live at Sound Factory, New York, 1990. Frankie Knuckles guesting at Sound Factory in New York, the club where Junior Vasquez held the residency, with a tracklist running through Shep Pettibone remixes and Alison Limerick. It documents the New York end of Knuckles' career after he left Chicago. The whole set circulates only as a tape rip like this one.
1991 - Crystal Waters - Gypsy Woman, live on Top of the Pops. Crystal Waters performing "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)" on Top of the Pops at the height of its 1991 run. The record is house at its most unlikely: a Korg M1 organ bassline, a nonsense hook, and a lyric about a woman living on the street outside an office block, sung straight into the pop charts. Period television footage of a record that carried the vocal house sound worldwide.
1991 - Crystal Waters - Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless). The record itself, produced by the Basement Boys in Baltimore and released in 1991. Its organ riff is the Korg M1 preset that defined the house sound of the early nineties, and its subject, a homeless woman the singer passed every day, is a reminder that this music kept reporting on the lives around it. The official label copy, kept over the several remix uploads the scout also returned.
1992-03-15 - Junior Vasquez at the Sound Factory, New York - 15 March 1992. Ninety minutes of Junior Vasquez at the Sound Factory, the after-hours room on West 27th Street whose largely gay, largely Black and Latino floor set the tone for 1990s New York club music. Restored from both sides of the original cassette.
1992 - Kenny Dope and Louie Vega live at Evolution, San Francisco. Eighty-eight minutes of Masters At Work playing an American club before either of them was famous, recorded off the floor. The tracklist is a snapshot of what New York house sounded like in 1992 when it was still a working DJ's record box rather than a canon. Pre-2000 club recordings of this length barely survive.
1992 - Club Zanzibar and the New Jersey sound, part 1. Tony Humphries on Zanzibar in Newark, the room where the garage sound was worked out alongside the Paradise Garage rather than after it. Zanzibar's floor was Black, largely gay and working-class Newark, and almost nothing else about it survives on film. Posted by Humphries himself, its resident DJ.
1992 - Club Zanzibar and the New Jersey sound, part 2. The second part of Tony Humphries' account of Club Zanzibar and the roots of the New Jersey sound. Follows the same thread: the Newark room, its dancers and the gospel-leaning vocal records that defined what Humphries played there. The only substantial video the archive has on Zanzibar.
1992 - Frankie Knuckles live at The Roxy, New York, 1992. A recording of Frankie Knuckles playing The Roxy in New York in 1992, later rebroadcast as a guest mix on Defected's radio show. By this point Knuckles had moved from Chicago to New York and was working the city's big gay clubs at the height of the vocal house era. The tape is the only form in which most of these nights survive.
1992-10-17 - Tony Humphries on 98.7 Kiss FM from Club Zanzibar - 17 Oct 1992. A ninety-minute WRKS Kiss FM broadcast taken live from Club Zanzibar in East Orange, New Jersey. This is the mechanism by which club records became city-wide hits: a commercial radio signal handed over to a working dancefloor. The air-check preserves both the mix and the station furniture around it.
1993 - Knuckles, Morales and Humphries at the Underground Network. Period footage of three of the defining DJs of the New York and New Jersey sound talking together at the Underground Network in 1993, the year after Levan's death. Humphries carried the garage sound at Zanzibar in Newark; Morales carried it into the remix industry. Short, but it is contemporaneous film of people usually only heard on tape.
1993 - Nuyorican Soul - The Nervous Track. Masters At Work's first record as Nuyorican Soul, on Nervous Records: congas, flute and a walking bassline turned into a house track with barely a drum machine in it. Vega and Gonzalez were two Latino kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn making Latin jazz legible to a house floor. Everything the project did later starts here.
1994 - Melanie Williams - Everyday Thang (Frankie Knuckles Def Mix). Knuckles remixing a British soul singer in 1994, in the piano-and-vocal style that made Def Mix the default treatment for major-label records that wanted a dancefloor. The founding Warehouse DJ working as a hired remixer is the whole story of house going commercial.
1996 - Nuyorican Soul feat. George Benson - You Can Do It (Baby). Louie Vega and Kenny Dope's Nuyorican Style Mix, a sixteen-minute live-band house record with George Benson playing and singing over it. Masters At Work used the Nuyorican Soul project to put Puerto Rican New York, Latin jazz and house musicians in the same room and record them properly. Almost no house record of the period was made with a band like this.
1996 - Fonda Rae - Livin' In Ecstasy (Mood II Swing New York Mix). Mood II Swing rebuilding a record for a singer who had been on New York dancefloors since 'Over Like a Fat Rat' in 1982. Lem Springsteen and John Ciafone's mix is the house end of that continuity: the same voice, a decade on, over their dry swung drums and sub-bass.
1996 - Mood II Swing - All Night Long. Lem Springsteen and John Ciafone's own production for Strictly Rhythm, from the 'Do It Your Way' album. Mood II Swing were the hinge between the Paradise Garage vocal tradition and the stripped 1990s New York club record, and this is that sound in its released form.
1997-03-17 - The Braxtons - The Boss (Masters At Work mix). Louie Vega and Kenny Dope's rework of the Braxton sisters' cover of Diana Ross's 'The Boss', issued as the third single from So Many Ways. It is the New York vocal-house formula in miniature: a disco standard rebuilt on a Masters At Work drum track for the club, then sold to radio.
1997 - David Morales interviewed on ITV's Shift, 1997. A late-night British television interview with David Morales at the peak of the remix era, when a New York house producer was a mainstream chart force. Period broadcast footage of a scene otherwise documented almost entirely in print.
1997 - Nuyorican Soul feat. India - Runaway. Masters At Work rebuilding the Salsoul Orchestra's 'Runaway' with India singing it, closing a twenty-year loop back to the label whose records made the Paradise Garage. India was one of the great house voices of the 1990s and this is her at full stretch. Live strings and percussion, cut for the club.
1997 - Smoke City - Mr Gorgeous (Mood II Swing Mix). A commercial remix commission showing how the New York duo's drum programming travelled: a British-Brazilian pop record dragged onto a Manhattan dancefloor. This is the everyday work that spread the Mood II Swing sound far beyond Strictly Rhythm's own catalogue.
1997 - Ultra Nate - Free. Strictly Rhythm's biggest crossover vocal record, written and sung by Ultra Nate with the Mood II Swing mix that became the definitive version. A gospel-shaped refrain about doing what you want, sung by a Black woman on a New York house label, taken to number one on the club chart.
1997-07-11 - Ultra Naté - Free, live on Top of the Pops. Ultra Naté performing "Free" on BBC's Top of the Pops in July 1997, the moment a Baltimore club record built on the New York vocal-house lineage crossed onto British primetime television. The song's gospel-shaped release, a Black woman singing about being free to do what she wants, is exactly the emotional register house inherited from the Garage and the Loft. Period broadcast footage, re-uploaded decades later.
1998 - Junior Vasquez - For the Record. A short film about Vasquez made at the height of the Sound Factory years, covering his residency and his remix work. Period documentary rather than retrospective, which makes it a primary source on how he was seen at the time.
1999 - Masters At Work feat. India - To Be In Love. The promo video for Masters At Work's biggest vocal record, with India singing over a Kenny Dope drum track. It is the New York gospel-and-Latin vocal line - the Paradise Garage lineage - arriving on daytime radio and in the UK top 25.
1999 - Pioneers: Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage. A BBC Radio 1 documentary narrated by Danny Tenaglia on Levan and the club he defined, told partly by the people who worked the room. It is one of very few broadcast treatments of a scene that left almost no photographic record. This is the longer cut of the film.
2001 - David Mancuso live at Respect, Paris. Almost two hours of Mancuso playing outside New York, in the style he never changed: records played whole, no mixing, sound quality treated as the entire point. He invented the private, non-commercial dance party in 1970 and spent thirty years refusing to turn it into a business. Recordings of him playing are rare.
2001 - Body & Soul NYC Vol. 4 - Krivit, Francois K and Joe Claussell. The fourth volume of the mix series that documented Body & Soul, the Sunday afternoon party that kept the Paradise Garage's mixed, largely Black and gay dancefloor alive into the 2000s. Danny Krivit, Francois Kevorkian and Joe Claussell mixing the room's actual repertoire.
2002-11-24 - Body & Soul live in New York - November 2002. Two and a half hours of the full Body & Soul trio at work, the long-form version of a party built on gospel-inflected vocal records and very slow builds. This is the closest thing to standing in the room.
2003 - Maestro: the story of Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage. The full feature documentary on the Garage and the wider New York dance underground, with interviews from the Loft and Garage circles including David Mancuso's milieu. It is the primary filmed source for a scene held together by Black, Latino and gay dancers who built their own room.
2003 - Frankie Knuckles presents Def Mix Productions, 2003. A sixty-minute air-check of Knuckles presenting the Def Mix roster, the production house he ran with David Morales that turned Chicago's original sound into New York's remix industry.
2005 - Tony Humphries interviewed in Lisbon, 2005. A found interview with Tony Humphries filmed at Queens Club in Lisbon and posted years later by the person who shot it. The sound is rough, but it catches him mid-career on the European circuit.
2005 - Little Louie Vega - Ministry of Sound Sessions Five. A full two-hour commercial mix CD by Louie Vega for the Ministry of Sound Sessions series, here restored in full. It documents the soulful, Latin-inflected New York house Vega was playing at the height of the superclub era.
2005 - Kerri Chandler - Red Bull Music Academy lecture, Seattle. Kerri Chandler on building the New Jersey deep house sound, growing up around Club Zanzibar in Newark and running Madhouse Records. The Jersey lineage is the direct continuation of the Paradise Garage vocal tradition, and Chandler is its most articulate surviving practitioner.
2006 - Frankie Knuckles and Tedd Patterson live for Def Mix, 2006. An hour of Frankie Knuckles alongside Tedd Patterson at a Def Mix event. Knuckles spent his later career in New York with Def Mix Productions, and recordings of him actually playing - rather than being interviewed about Chicago - are comparatively scarce.
2007 - The Godfather of Disco: Mel Cheren and West End Records. Feature documentary on Mel Cheren, who founded West End Records and bankrolled the Paradise Garage, with Danny Krivit, Louie Vega, Nicky Siano, Joey Llanos and Tony Humphries. It is the business and the friendship behind the club, told by an openly gay label owner who later put his money into AIDS activism. West End is where much of the Garage's own record supply came from.
2007 - Body & Soul live in New York - 2007. A later Body & Soul recording with Claussell, Kevorkian and Krivit, from the years after the weekly residency ended and the party ran as occasional reunions. Useful for hearing how the selection aged without the sound changing.
2008 - Arthur Russell, Dinosaur L's "Go Bang!" and Mancuso's Loft. An excerpt from Matt Wolf's portrait of Arthur Russell, built around the night "Go Bang!" landed at David Mancuso's Loft in the François Kevorkian edit. It connects downtown New York's avant-garde to the dancefloor that house grew out of. The Loft parties were invitation-only, sold nothing, and set the template the Garage inherited.
2008-07-21 - Danny Krivit on how New York shaped his DJing. A short sit-down interview with Krivit on the city's influence across his career, from the downtown loft parties to Body & Soul and 718 Sessions. Early enough to catch him before the recent wave of house retrospectives.
2010-08-19 - Danny Krivit on the art of the disco edit. Krivit explaining how he re-edits records for the floor, made around a compilation of his edits for Strut. The edit is the connective tissue between 1970s disco and house, and this is the practitioner describing the technique directly.
2011-01-01 - 718 Sessions New Year's Day party, Santos Party House. Phone footage of the floor at Krivit's 718 Sessions on New Year's Day 2011 while 'You Bought the Sunshine' plays. Rough, but it is dancers rather than a DJ booth, and that is the scarce material for this facet.
2011-05-02 - Back in the House - New York house documentary trailer. An eleven-minute trailer for a five-hour documentary on 1990s New York house, with Francois K, Tony Humphries, Timmy Regisford, Kerri Chandler, Joe Claussell and Frankie Knuckles on camera. The full film is hard to find, so this stands as the surviving public cut of that footage.
2011-10-26 - Frankie Knuckles on working the lights for Larry Levan. Knuckles describing the years before either of them was famous, when he ran lights while Levan played. The two founding figures of house and garage met as teenagers in New York's Black queer nightlife and came up through the Continental Baths together. A short, load-bearing piece of testimony.
2012 - Frankie Knuckles at the Def Mix party, Amsterdam. Three minutes of Knuckles DJing in Amsterdam in 2012, playing 'The Whistle Song'. He died in 2014, so late footage of him behind the decks rather than in an interview chair is worth keeping.
2012 - Kerri Chandler - Boiler Room London, second appearance. Kerri Chandler's second Boiler Room, an hour of the deep, chord-heavy New Jersey house he has been making since the late 1980s. The New York and New Jersey garage lineage barely survives in photographs, so filmed sets by its surviving practitioners carry most of the weight.
2012 - Kerri Chandler - Boiler Room London, first appearance. Kerri Chandler's first Boiler Room, described at the time as twenty years into a career that started with Madhouse Records and the Club Zanzibar orbit in New Jersey. It is the earlier of his two 2012 London sessions.
2012-12-03 - Robert Owens performs Tears live at the HMV Forum, London. A full seven-minute live reading of Tears, filmed from the wings. Owens' delivery is the gospel inheritance the garage facet is built on, sung by one of the few people who was actually in the room when house was being invented.
2013-01-03 - Danny Krivit and Reverend P in conversation. Danny Krivit, of Body & Soul and a New York record family, in conversation at the Paris club Djoon. Short, and posted by the venue, but the garage lineage has so little filmed material that even a club's own clip is worth holding.
2013-04-26 - Real Scenes: New York. Resident Advisor returns to the city that gave dance music the Loft and the Paradise Garage and asks what survived the Giuliani-era cabaret-law crackdown. It sets the Levan and Mancuso inheritance, rooms built by and for Black, Latino and gay New Yorkers who were not welcome elsewhere, against the loft parties and small clubs carrying it on. The garage lineage has almost no surviving visual record, which makes this film unusually valuable here.
2013 - Masters At Work live in Sydney. An hour of Louie Vega and Kenny Dope playing together in Sydney, captured by an audience camera. Useful as evidence of how far the New York sound travelled and of what a MAW back-to-back actually sounds like outside a club-brand livestream.
2013 - Tom Moulton on the first mixtape and the remix. Tom Moulton invented the extended dance remix and the 12-inch single, and his Salsoul and Philadelphia mixes are the raw material every New York house DJ inherited. Here he explains how the first continuous mix tape and the first remixes came about, and how the industry reacted to a man rearranging other people's records.
2013 - Masters At Work on The Ha Dance, Nuyorican Soul and NYC. Louie Vega and Kenny Dope on growing up Puerto Rican in New York, the DJs and clubs that formed them, and how their remixes and the Nuyorican Soul project pulled Latin music into house. Two hours of first-hand account from the pair who defined the New York sound of the 1990s.
2013 - François K on Arthur Russell and Depeche Mode's Violator. François Kevorkian on the New York years, remixing, engineering, working with Arthur Russell, and later mixing Violator. Kevorkian called the Paradise Garage sound system a temple, and he is one of the few people who can describe both that room and the recording studios that fed it.
2014-05-11 - What Is the Paradise Garage? - Larry Levan Way block party. Thousands fill King Street in SoHo for a block party outside the Paradise Garage's former home, at the naming of Larry Levan Way. The Garage was a members' club for Black and Latino gay New York, and this is the city finally putting that on a street sign, twenty-seven years after the club closed and twenty-two after Levan died.
2014 - Tony Humphries on Zanzibar, KISS FM and the Jersey sound. A Red Bull Music Academy lecture from the DJ who made Newark's Club Zanzibar and New York radio into a single institution. Humphries' KISS FM mixes taught a generation of listeners what a house record was supposed to sound like.
2014-07-08 - Dennis Ferrer on getting started and Kerri Chandler. A short interview in which the New York house producer describes how he came up and what Kerri Chandler's mentorship meant to him. It is a small piece of oral history connecting two generations of the East Coast garage lineage.
2014-08-28 - Masters At Work - Boiler Room London. Louie Vega and Kenny Dope play a full Boiler Room in London: two of the architects of New York house, working records the way they did at Sound Factory Bar. The set is the clearest modern document of the Garage-descended vocal and Latin-house lineage in action.
2015 - Kerri Chandler b2b Chez Damier at the final Southport Weekender. An hour from the closing back-to-back by Kerri Chandler and Chez Damier at the last edition of Southport Weekender. Chandler carried New Jersey's church-rooted deep house and Damier came out of Chicago and Detroit, and the pairing is the two lineages in one booth. Filmed by Mixmag at the end of a four-hour goodbye set.
2015 - Kerri Chandler in conversation at ADE. A long career conversation recorded at Amsterdam Dance Event, ten years after his Red Bull lecture, in which Chandler talks about what still pushes his DJing and production. It catches the New Jersey deep house tradition at the point where it had become a fixture of the European club circuit.
2016-01-01 - Masters At Work live at Ministry of Sound, 1 January 2016. Louie Vega and Kenny Dope playing a four-hour New Year's Day set at Ministry of Sound, a club explicitly modelled on the Paradise Garage. Masters At Work are the direct continuation of the New York Latino and Black dance tradition that ran from the Garage through Strictly Rhythm. The full-length recording shows how they build a room over hours rather than in a highlight.
2016-05-12 - Nicky Siano on the Gallery, Larry Levan and life after music. A full Red Bull Music Academy lecture with the founder of the Gallery, the 1970s New York party where Levan and Knuckles worked before either had a residency. Siano is the direct eyewitness to the point where disco becomes the thing house grew out of.
2016 - Kerri Chandler b2b Jeremy Underground - Boiler Room London. A two-hour back-to-back pairing Kerri Chandler with Jeremy Underground, a French collector who grew up on his records. It is a rare filmed example of the New York and New Jersey deep-house canon being handed over in real time between generations.
2016 - Louie Vega - Boiler Room New York. Louie Vega of Masters At Work playing New York with live vocals from Dominique Bingham and keys from Axel Tosca, showcasing his 'Starring… XXVIII' album. Vega's Latin and gospel-inflected house is the direct continuation of the Paradise Garage and Salsoul records the city's clubs were built on.
2017-03-15 - A Larry Levan story: "Release Yourself" into "When Doves Cry". A first-hand account of one night on the Garage floor when Levan mixed two records and took the room apart. Testimony like this is most of what survives of a club nobody was allowed to photograph. Short, specific and told by someone who was standing there.
2017-03-15 - François Kevorkian interviewed on tour. A long interview with François Kevorkian, the Paradise Garage engineer and remixer who did as much as anyone to define what a 12-inch remix could be. The upload carries no description, but the conversation runs close to twenty minutes.
2017 - Come As You Are - the Loft era in New York. A short documentary on the Loft and what club dancing meant to the Latino and African American New Yorkers who built it. It treats the dancefloor as a place of repair rather than nightlife, which is how the people in it describe it. Direct testimony from a scene with almost no surviving imagery.
2017 - Kerri Chandler b2b Disclosure - kitchen mix. Kerri Chandler and Disclosure playing back to back on a domestic kitchen counter, filmed for Chandler's own channel. Disclosure's success rested openly on the New Jersey and New York house records Chandler helped make, and the two hours here are the acknowledgement in practice.
2017 - Louie Vega - Boiler Room, Brazil. Louie Vega playing in Brazil, leaning hard on percussion and broken rhythm rather than straight four-to-the-floor. It shows the Latin side of New York house meeting a South American crowd that already had its own percussive dance tradition.
2017-07-03 - Body & Soul 21st anniversary on Governors Island. The party's 21st anniversary, moved outdoors to Governors Island for an afternoon in July 2017. Short, but it shows the dancers, which is the part of this lineage that photographs almost never preserve.
2017-09-03 - Danny Krivit on record pools, the Paradise Garage and the Loft. A long Red Bull Music Academy lecture with a DJ who was inside the Loft and the Paradise Garage and ran a record pool. Since almost no photography of those rooms exists, first-hand accounts like this are the primary source for the whole garage story.
2017-09-26 - Maestro: Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage - trailer. Trailer for Josell Ramos's 2003 film on the Loft and Paradise Garage, released online by Boiler Room on the exact thirtieth anniversary of the Garage closing. Maestro is the primary filmed source on the club and the people in it. The trailer carries the surviving footage most viewers will ever see.
2018-02-13 - Louie Vega - soulful house set in The Lab, London. Louie Vega playing Mixmag's London studio for a Ministry of Sound and Groove Odyssey takeover, an hour and a half of vocal, soulful house. Ministry of Sound was itself modelled on the Paradise Garage, which makes the booking a closed loop.
2018-03-01 - Todd Terry interviewed in Red Hook, Brooklyn. A studio interview with Todd Terry recorded in Red Hook for a Brooklyn interview series. Local, unhurried, and rooted in the neighbourhood the records came out of.
2018-03-08 - Tony Humphries in conversation in Milan. A short interview with Tony Humphries recorded during a visit to House of Frankie's Milan studio. Brief, but filmed Humphries testimony is scarce and the Zanzibar and Jersey lineage has almost no visual record at all.
2018 - David Mancuso and the Loft, New York. A short film piece on Mancuso and the Loft party he started in 1970 at 647 Broadway. It covers the model that made everything downstream possible: invitation only, nothing sold, no cabaret licence needed. Brief, but the facet has very little moving image at all.
2018 - Nicky Siano on the Gallery and Studio 54. A sixteen-minute interview recorded at a party in 2018, with Siano on running the Gallery and on later DJing at Studio 54. Covers the transition from a members' loft party for a mostly Black and gay crowd to the celebrity club that displaced it.
2018-12-18 - Louie Vega - Times Square Transmissions, The Lot Radio. Nearly two hours of Louie Vega broadcast live from The Lot Radio's Times Square residency, a New York DJ playing New York records in the middle of the city. Independent street-level radio like this is where the garage lineage is still actually transmitted rather than commemorated.
2019-02-27 - Masters At Work and MikeQ on "The Ha Dance". How a 1991 Masters At Work B-side became the fundamental record of ballroom, its horn stab cued to the dip in a vogue performance. Ballroom was built by Black and Latino queer New York out of the same clubs as house, and this is the clearest single example of the two scenes sharing a record.
2019 - Kerri Chandler - classic house set at BUDX Amsterdam. Kerri Chandler playing an hour and a half of well-known house records at BUDX in Amsterdam, filmed by Mixmag. It is Chandler in crowd-pleasing rather than deep mode, and doubles as a useful survey of the canon he helped write. The camera stays on the mixer for much of it.
2019-07-22 - Selectors: Danny Krivit. A portrait film on Danny Krivit, five decades into a New York DJing life running from his father's club through the Loft and Body & Soul. He talks about records he has been playing for longer than most of his audience has been alive.
2020-01-13 - Larry's Garage - documentary trailer. Trailer for Corrado Rizza's feature on Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage, assembled from interviews with the people who were in the room. It is the most recent attempt to film a club that was demolished in April 2018. The trailer shows what footage the production could still find.
2020-05-11 - David Morales in conversation on The House of Music. A talk-show interview with David Morales, the Brooklyn DJ who came up through the Paradise Garage and built Def Mix into the dominant remix house of the 1990s. Recorded during the lockdown shutdown, he talks about what reading a room actually involves and what happens when there is no room.
2020 - Danny Krivit interviewed for Dekmantel Selectors. Dekmantel's Selectors portrait of Krivit, covering five decades of New York DJing and the editing habits that shaped his sets. A compact statement of method from one of the last people still working who played those rooms.
2020 - Honey Dijon - NYC Downlow session, Glastonbury. Honey Dijon plays the NYC Downlow, the queer venue at Glastonbury built as a reconstruction of a 1980s New York meatpacking-district club. It is one of the few filmed places where the specifically Black and gay New York room that house came out of is recreated rather than described, and Honey Dijon, who came up through those clubs, is the right person in it.
2020-08-15 - François K - The Roots of House, a set with commentary. A near two-hour DJ set of the disco and post-disco records that turned into house, with Kevorkian narrating the transition as he plays it. He was working in the rooms this music came out of, so the commentary is first-hand rather than reconstructed.
2021-01-28 - David Morales oral history for True House Stories. A long interview in Lenny Fontana's oral-history series, tracing Morales from a Brooklyn childhood to the Paradise Garage and then Def Mix. Fontana is a peer from the same scene, and the questions go where a press interview would not.
2021 - David Mancuso and Francis Grasso - documentary. An Italian-language documentary piece on Francis Grasso, who invented beatmatching at the Sanctuary, and David Mancuso, who invented the party. Together they are the two halves of what a DJ became. It is one of the few filmed treatments of the pre-house New York lineage.
2021-07-20 - Why did house dancing leave the club?. A short film on house dance, lofting, jacking, footwork, a tradition as old as the music, born among the dancers of the Loft, the Paradise Garage and the Warehouse who took their craft as seriously as the DJs did. It asks why that skill migrated out of nightclubs and into studios and competitions.
2021-11-10 - Kerri Chandler - reel-to-reel live stream from his studio. An hour-long live stream of Kerri Chandler mixing from reel-to-reel tape in his own studio, broadcast by Defected. It shows the mechanics of his setup close up, which almost no club footage does. Chandler is the central figure of the New Jersey deep house lineage that runs directly out of the Paradise Garage.
2022-02-04 - Todd Terry: interview and DJ set. Todd Terry talks and then plays, which is the right order for a producer whose records are best explained by hearing how he mixes them. Covers his Brooklyn beginnings and the sample-heavy New York house he defined.
2022-03-10 - Nicky Siano on Studio 54 and running the Gallery. Siano on being hired as a resident when Steve Rubell opened Studio 54 while still running the Gallery at weekends. First-hand detail on how the New York club economy of the late 1970s actually worked, and who it worked for.
2022-03-22 - Nicky Siano on the Gallery and New York's disco roots. Nicky Siano, who ran the Gallery and whom Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles replaced at the Continental Baths, on the rooms house grew directly out of. The pre-history of the garage sound, told by one of the people who built it.
2022-03-22 - Carolyn Byrd on Club Zanzibar, Body & Soul and the Shelter. A radio oral history with Carolyn Byrd, DJ and record-label executive, on Newark's Club Zanzibar and the New York rooms that carried the garage sound into the 1990s. A woman's first-hand account of a history almost always told through men.
2022 - Kerri Chandler reel-to-reel set at the Roundhouse, London. Two hours of Kerri Chandler playing from reel-to-reel tape at the Roundhouse in Camden, with a hologram staging. Chandler's records, cut in New Jersey out of gospel, soul and the Garage sound, are heard here in the analogue format he mixes them on. It is a rare filmed document of a DJ working tape rather than digital files.
2022-07-07 - The making of Kerri Chandler's "Subbie". Chandler tells the story behind "Subbie", the track he named for Glasgow's Sub Club, as part of his practice of writing records about specific rooms and the people in them. It is a compact demonstration of how a deep house record gets its subject.
2023-04-18 - Lem Springsteen of Mood II Swing - Defected Broadcasting House set. Two hours of Lem Springsteen playing his own 1990s Mood II Swing catalogue in Defected's London basement. It is a rare case of the producer of the records selecting them himself, which makes it usable both as a set and as an annotated discography.
2023-05-16 - Doug Smith on New York house versus Chicago house. The Jersey-born DJ and producer, half of 95 North, sets out plainly what separates the two cities: Chicago's raw drum-machine tracks against New York's song-based, gospel-trained vocal records out of the Paradise Garage and Zanzibar. Short, but it is a practitioner drawing the distinction the archive keeps having to explain.
2023-06-02 - Nicky Siano: the Gallery, the full interview. A long radio oral history with Nicky Siano covering Brooklyn, the Gallery, and the 1970s New York club circuit out of which both disco and house came. He is one of the last first-hand witnesses to the rooms that made Levan and Knuckles.
2023-06-02 - Black House Black Joy: the New Jersey house community. WBGO's Come Sunday hosts a conversation on the Black House Black Joy podcast about New Jersey's house scene, the Newark and Jersey City lineage that runs through Club Zanzibar and Tony Humphries out of the Paradise Garage. It treats house as Black social history rather than a genre tag, which is exactly the frame this archive needs for the garage side of the story.
2023-06-03 - Louie Vega - three-hour classic house and disco set at Jackies. An open-to-close set by Louie Vega at Jackies, held at La Terrrazza in Barcelona, running more than three hours through classic house and disco. The length lets him move through the whole New York lineage he came out of rather than a festival hour of peaks. Filmed as a continuous recording.
2023 - Robert Owens - Tears, live at the Jazz Cafe, London. Owens singing Tears in a London club nearly thirty-five years after cutting it with Frankie Knuckles and Satoshi Tomiie for Def Mix in New York. The vocal/gospel line that runs from the Paradise Garage into house is still a live, sung thing rather than an archive item, and this shows it.
2023 - Kerri Chandler - reel-to-reel set, Boiler Room New York. Kerri Chandler plays a set from reel-to-reel tape in New York, recorded in spatial audio. Chandler came out of New Jersey's Club Zanzibar orbit and ran Madhouse Records; the deep, keyboard-led sound he plays here is the direct descendant of the Paradise Garage and Zanzibar rooms that no longer exist on film.
2023-06-16 - The Blessed Madonna - 'Mercy' with Jacob Lusk at Sónar. A live performance of 'Mercy' at Sónar in Barcelona with Jacob Lusk singing, a gospel voice over four-to-the-floor. That combination is the oldest thread in the music, the vocal and gospel lineage that ran through the Paradise Garage and Club Zanzibar, being used on a European festival stage in 2023.
2024-07-11 - Armand Van Helden - Boiler Room: Miami. Armand Van Helden, whose 1990s New York remixes and filter-house records pushed house back into the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, playing in Miami thirty years on. The set is a working demonstration of the New York house canon he helped write.
2025 - Louie Vega - soulful classic house set, Los Angeles. Louie Vega playing classic soulful house for the Stardust series in Los Angeles. It shows the Nuyorican Soul and Masters At Work end of his catalogue in a club rather than festival setting. A straightforward, well-filmed record of a founding New York DJ still working.
2025 - Joe Claussell b2b Ron Trent - Kappa FuturFestival, Turin. Two deep house lifers back to back on the KOSMO stage in Turin. Joe Claussell's Body & Soul parties carried the Paradise Garage's spiritual, percussive, gospel-inflected reading of house through 1990s New York, and Ron Trent brings the Chicago side of the same conversation. Seeing the New York garage lineage played by someone who was actually in those rooms is rare on video.
2025-10-05 - Nicky Siano disco set for Book Club Radio, New York. Nicky Siano, who opened the Gallery in 1972 and taught Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles to DJ, playing an eighty-minute disco set in New York in 2025. The oldest link in this chain, still working a floor.
2026-02-24 - Todd Terry on Brooklyn, hip-hop roots and house. A long conversation with Todd Terry about growing up in New York, coming up through hip-hop, and the moment house reached him. The clickbait title undersells a substantial oral history from one of the architects of the New York sound.
2026 - Louie Vega live in Atlanta. Louie Vega playing a deep and vocal house set in Atlanta, filmed in full. Vega, half of Masters At Work and a Bronx-raised Puerto Rican DJ, is one of the few people still carrying the New York vocal tradition into current rooms. The set is built around songs and singers rather than tracks.