Harold's DJ Booth: August 2015

Harold Heath's Supa-Summer-Sounds 2015 by Harold Heath on Mixcloud

This mix was triggered by a chat on Facebook one afternoon, with me soliciting suggestions for the perfect summer mixtape. Aside from songs which actually mentioned summer or the sun all the music also had to possess an essential 'summeryness'. Quite what this quality is is hard to quantify, and much easier to communicate with the music itself; listen to 'Feel it all Around' by Washed Out or 'Strollin' by the Sunburst Band for example. To my ears they both sound essentially 'summery' - they have a quality to them of still, shimmering heat and of glowing warmth. Through some careful or accidental manipulation of melody and harmony or clever juxtaposition of tone and texture, they somehow evoke the sun's sparkle on the sea in summer or the feel of hot black tarmac in the midday sun. And whilst there are plenty of other tunes that also have this quality (a substantial amount of Air's back catalog for example - of which more later) these two served a specific purpose within the context of the whole mix, so they got in. And the name of the 'Sunburst' Band - that's pretty summery right?

For me, its great to have a focus or theme when doing a mixtape, as it helps narrow down the content. My ideal Sunday afternoon is a friend calling and saying they urgently need 2 hours of exquisitely programmed, mulit-genre music for a book launch, consisting only of artists whose names begin with either P or R. Yes, no worries, I'll get straight to it.

This 'Supa-Summer-Sounds' mix covers many different genres and music from a 40 year time span and includes music released this year. Making this much disparate music somehow gel and flow together as part of a larger whole is a particular skill, one that some DJs aren't too concerned about, instead insisting that track selection is the single and only important factor. It isn't. Track selection is the single most important factor no doubt but my opinion has always been that once a DJ has achieved and is maintaining a collection of the finest music, then they can enhance the listeners experience of their music, simply by when they play a particular track and how they manage the transition from one piece of music to another. If you wanted to distill DJing down to it's very barest elements, it's this:

What, then when, then how.

I've always enjoyed the compositional element of DJing. Just like countless other DJs, I've watched dance floors for years and have learnt that context is everything; even the finest tracks can fail if they're presented in the wrong way or at the wrong time. Equally a night that looks doomed can be rescued by a good selection. DJing is like serving a meal at a restaurant, and every individual track is a potential dish: it might be that you, the restaurateur / DJ have the finest almond and cinnamon danish pastry ever created, but if you offer it up to someone who in the middle of eating a roast chicken dinner, then they're not going to want it right at that moment, no matter how good it is. Get these decisions wrong and the diners will become unhappy. They may even refuse to pay the bill. Get the decisions right and you might just soundtrack a night that will become one of their most treasured memories.

The mixtape gets it name from the first track: 'Summer Madness' by Kool and the Gang. Also known as the song which was sampled by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince on their bona fide summer pop-rap classic "Summertime". It's a lovely piece of restrained jazz/soul with gorgeous Rhodes chords, warm synth washes and the signature Arp Odyssey synth octaves. It is the first of a few of the more obvious choices on this mixtape, the second being Quincy Jone's classic interpretation of 'Summer in the City', a groove you may recognise from being sampled on tracks from the Pharcyde, the Roots and Nightmares on Wax. In a great example of musical restraint and teasing, Valerie Simpon's vocal doesn't even come in until halfway through the song, and when it does, it comes in halfway through the last line of the verse before the chorus. Its one of her finest performances, her sweet, syrupy vocals melding with the thick chords of the strings and organ in a near-perfect audio evocation of the hot and heavy air of a city night. 'You've Got it Bad Girl', the Quincy Jones album this is from, is well worth checking out.

Large swathes of 'French band' Air's early output perfectly capture the warmth, light and still of summer for me. Many of their tracks from Premiers Symptomes and Moon Safari could have qualified for this mix on the strength of their warmth alone - to me they almost glow - however, 'Le soleil est pres de moi' ('The sun is close to me') makes the grade because of the brilliant song-title.

Special mention goes to Ashley Slater's 'Private Sunshine'; it's a good song with a strong hook, the backing really swings with a low level restraint that is very appealing and the stuttering string edits that appear only twice during the track add a nice contrasting cold, technical edge to the synths and crackly jazz samples. I love records which mix and match acoustic and organic sounds, feels and textures with electronics in interesting ways and I particularly love if the juxtapositions can confuse me and the listener as to the date of the recording. Detroit's Moodymann excels at this, re-positioning slathers of old audio into new pieces that manage to simultaneously sound both new and somehow evocative of older genres like disco, soul and jazz. The continued development and wider availability of good quality home recording and editing software has made the possibility of incorporating older pieces of musical texture into new shapes much easier and at the same time, has made the DJ's job more fun. Good DJing is all about this re-contextualising of music, playing something in a new context, representing it in a way that brings out elements that perhaps it wouldn't otherwise be known for - this is why the best underground DJs love to occasionally play an obscure 80s synth pop b-side they've re-edited because they know that even in the midst of the deepest, most underground tech-house set they've ever played, if they set up the sonic context correctly, then that b-side will KILL.

In keeping with this idea of tracks that exist almost 'out of time', or that are at least difficult to place chronologically, I've also included some hazy low-key summer-themed house, electronica and drum and bass and some jazz and latin in between, moving between decades, countries and genres to create the whole. In my mind, this aspect - how many tunes of certain genres to include, how much electronic music to how much organic, how many vocal tracks to instrumentals - these are all part of the overall decision-making required to produce a broad-genre mixtape that is perfectly balanced and that people will want to return to. Tracks like the Moodymann's 'Youlooklykeicecreaminsummertyme', the Ballistic Brothers 'Portobello Cafe' and Nu Yorican Soul's interpretation of 'Black Gold of the Sun' all are 'modern' tracks - in that they're constructed in studios on software rather than by bands playing together - but they all directly reference music of the past. Contemporary beats can sometimes sound over-powerful/harsh when played next to older records - but tunes like these with one foot in the past and the one firmly in the present are just perfect when mixing up music from different decades, they act like glue and hold the entire mix together.

Certain sub-genres of Hip Hop, being sample heavy, are perfect for this task and in fact, there was a period during the mid-to-late 80s, when, for me, Norman Jay was the world's most perfect sounding DJ because he could put together these fabulously coherent but varied sets that just wandered through the last couple decades of black music but were tied together by the most cutting edge music of the time - US hip hop - which had started to sample old black music from 10-20 years earlier. So the DJ could go from the old funk and soul records to the brand new hype jams and it would all hang together perfectly. It was in this spirit that I went through some of my old hip hop collection to see what might fit in with this mixtape - and the Handsome Boy Modelling School's offering (hip hop supergroup Prince Paul and Dan "The Automator" Nakamura) 'Sunshine' fits the bill. Its what people call a 'head nodder' for obvious reasons, and is a tune of contrasts; on the one hand its lazy beats and sleepy samples give it a hazy laid-back feel, and on the other it has a thick, almost claustrophobic quality to the production and vocal, that recalls the dense, dark almost paranoid feel of Sly Stone's 'There's A Riot Goin' On'.

Finally, I also wanted to mention Rick James's 'Gettin it on (in the Sunshine)', a recent discovery for me. Any track that starts off with birdsong is already scoring points with me before the music even starts. 'Getting it On' starts off with a little hippie acoustic guitar figure before the swooping strings, harps and angelic choirs begin and it's sounding as though its about to get all Rotary Connection before Rick comes in with an over-the-top vocal, and just when you think that's it, we're in the middle of an over-ripe plum of a ballad, then Rick lets the funk rip as the rhythm section kicks in - and suddenly, we're all getting it on in the sunshine.

Harold Heath's Supa-Summer-Sounds

Click on the song title to go to a shop to buy a song. I've re-edited a few of the tracks on this compilation so some will sound different if you buy the original

Kool and the Gang - Summer Madness

Quincy Jones - Summer in the City

Air - Le Soleil est pres de Moi

Lonnie Liston Smith - Summer Nights

Ashley Slater - Private Sunshine

Ramp - Everybody Loves The Sunshine

Rick James - Getting in on in the Sunshine

Leo’s Starship - Give me the Sunshine

Sunburst Band - Strollin'

Washed Out - Feel it All Around

Stevie Wonder - Summer Soft

Leon Ware - California