Celebration - A Soulful House Journey - Mixed by BLAZE (Disc 2)
They’ve got stamina down Easy Street. While other labels have arrived, taken over the world and then promptly collapsed, Easy Street, without half the pomp and circumstance has continued ploughing a unique furrow through the heart of New York dance music. So unique, in fact, that it recently celebrated its 20th anniversary.
Easy Street opened its doors for business in 1983 at the height of a new wave of dance music emanating from the Tri-State area. A new electronic sound was emerging, a mixture of innovation and expediency (those orchestras cost a lotta dough, baby!). Produced from the ruinous ashes of disco’s collapse, this new sound - the foundation upon which the Easy Street sound was built. Both the Paradise Garage and, particularly, New Jersey’s Club Zanzibar were in full flow and the sound of Easy Street found ready homes in both (among many others worldwide).
Early club hits were registered, firstly with World Premiere’s Share The Night and thence with You Don’t Know by Serious Intention (both, incidentally, also minor pop hits in the UK). Drawing on the sound pioneered by D Train and Peech Boys, they delivered the testifying lyrics of the church with beats founded in studios such as Kling Klang, Kraftwerk’s homebase; it was a sound that made the transition from disco to house both smooth and plausible. There is also Ma Foom Bey by Cultural Vibe, a record so otherworldly, that twenty years hence still sounds like nothing else on earth. Ma Foom Bey was mixed by Tony Humphries, the resident DJ at the Zanz (it was also an anthem at the East Orange club) and the New Jersey connection is writ large in the Easy Street sound.
Key to the success of Easy Street is the omnipresence of Blaze, the Jersey production team responsible for several of the label’s hits, from a string of brilliant singles by Cassio (of which Baby Love is included here) to Keisha Jenkins as well as the crossover smash Hideaway by De’Lacy. They have proved themselves the most durably adept songwriters of the house generation, transcending trends and styles and outlasting many more vaunted acts.
What you’re listening to now is not only the sound of twenty years of dance music compressed on to two CDs, but in its own way, a potted history of modern soul. Leaving aside the vagaries of genre descriptions, Easy Street is a soul label whose records have been made with aid of computers. Those who refuse to believe – and there are many – that soul music and computers are in any way compatible should take a listen to Celebration - A Soulful House Journey. This is nothing, more or less, than modern soul music done right.
Bill Brewster
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