As half of Masters At Work, one of the most important production/DJ teams on the New York scene in the early ’90s, “Little” Louie Vega helped define an earthy yet effervescent strain of house music that percolated through the city and beyond. Not all dance hits make the jump from the clubs to the charts, but Masters At Work achieved the feat several times — in 1993, the duo reached the top of the Dance Club Songs chart with two different singles. Due to their success and influence, Masters At Work’s output has been compiled and anthologized numerous times. But Louie Vega Starring…XXVIII, which arrived last month, represents Vega’s very first solo album.
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The joyfully syncopated rhythms in MAW showed a fluid understanding of earlier genres that inspired dancing, especially funk, disco, and Latin music. (Both Marc Anthony and India, who went on to reinvigorate salsa in the ‘90s, appeared on MAW singles.) Vega and his partner, Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez, valued singers with texture and dynamism, often women indebted to the full-voiced belters of the late ‘70s. When these vocalists joined forces with MAW’s relentless beats, the result was exhilarating and combustible.
Vega’s style remains intact on his new album, which includes eight remixes and 20 originals. “I needed 28 songs to tell a story,” the DJ/producer explains on the phone. “I thought this would be the best way to show what I’ve done. All the different styles of house music and cultures and rhythms and a lot of stuff that I brought into the house sound — put it all on one album.”
To achieve this diversity, Vega worked with more than 20 different artists. “I thought it was best, especially for the younger generation, to see the roots of our music,” he notes. His album includes Jocelyn Brown, who came up singing on disco records in the ‘70s, Leroy Burgess, the man known as the king of boogie (Burgess once described the sub-genre as “nothing but disco, slowed down a little bit”), and Caron Wheeler, whose work in the late ‘80s presaged the neo-soul movement.
The album’s lead single, “Just The Way I Like It” featuring Cassio Ware, also calls back to Vega’s origins. “I wanted to pick a song that really represents the underground,” he declares. “Ware is from New Jersey; he did a lot of great records. He’s always been a big part of the New Jersey house scene, and New York City’s. I wanted to release a song that really represented that.”
“Just The Way I Like It,” a throbbing, lusty tale of club romance, was based on an experience Ware had at Vega’s weekly party in Manhattan, Roots NYC. The track is premiering today exclusively on Billboard, along with several reworks.
But Louie Vega Starring is not just a retrospective project. “I got to experiment as well, bringing the Funkadelic sound into house,” Vega says. His remix of “Ain’t That Funkin’ Kind Of Hard On Ya?”, which came out in 2014, suggests that the dense, idiosyncratic grooves favored by George Clinton’s ensemble sit easily next to more modern forms of dance music. Funkadelic’s track grabbed Vega the minute he heard it; he started working on his own version the same night. “You heard the rough mix and it sounded like a hit,” he remembers. “I started playing it out, and I went to South Africa. By the time that song got to the second chorus — I took out all the lows and mid-range, you only heard high — the entire crowd sang the hook.”
In addition, Vega pushed more explicitly into the world of gospel on Louie Vega Starring than he had in the past. “Dance” is a remix of a song from what he calls “the royal families of gospel music,” the Winans Brothers and the Clark Sisters. The ecstatic peaks common in religious tunes make a natural match for dance music, even though the genres tend to be absorbed at very different times of day. “BeBe Winans said I’m the first one to bring him to a club,” Vega jokes. “He was like, ‘what, I gotta perform at two in the morning? I go to sleep at nine p.m.!’” In addition to expanding Winans’ world, the collaboration was well received commercially. According to Vega, “‘Dance’ got on WBLS and over 25 urban AC stations. I never had a record on urban AC and gospel stations before.”
That’s not as surprising as it seems – the style Vega helped popularize is having a major moment in mainstream culture. “People are digging into house music even from other genres,” he says. “On the George Clinton record, we were able to get Kendrick Lamar to lace it,” he continues. “That kind of shows you. Kanye West just sampled two of Barbara Tucker’s records that I co-wrote and produced.”
Vega isn’t bothered by all the cross-pollination. “It’s a compliment for me when people are influenced by music we produced and created,” he says. This good will extends to the thrashing, arena-ready tunes that are currently the most popular form of dance music. “I think it’s healthy to have a lot of different styles within a genre,” Vega notes. “It makes it much more interesting.”
“House music is the root of all electronic dance music,” he continues. “I heard a documentary and they were asking David Guetta about his influences: [he said] David Morales, Masters At Work, Frankie Knuckles. [Younger DJs] know who we are, and they are influenced by our stuff. You may not hear it in their music, but when they started out, what were they listening to?” Louie Vega Starring offers Vega another opportunity to impact the dancefloors of the future.