With the release of Genius Of Time, it’s apt to discuss the role of the DJ in modern music, and who better to zero in on than Brooklynite and taste maker, the late Larry Levan, a man synonymous with creatively-original and emotionally-charged resident DJ sets at NYC’s revered Paradise Garage. The sets he created back in the late ’70s and ’80s provided the earliest definition of what is now known as Garage. However, the music he created was, and is, best heard coming out of speakers in heaving clubs whose dancers have attained heightened states of emotion; it’s not music that ought to weakly leak through earphones as you ride the tube to Officeland.

As well as being a DJ, Levan was known as a pioneer and perfectionist, responsible for versions of classic tracks in which the blueprint for future club sounds was drawn. And here’s the problem: today a DJ (since the Paradise Garage days) has assumed an interposing role between a recording artist and the public. Perhaps one might call it good PR for the artist, a symbiosis whereby the artist’s forgotten song has new life breathed into it by a remixer who, for himself, can concoct a notoriety upon which he can build a commercial reputation. Which artist wouldn’t want someone reconstituting a song for crowded dance floors? Good business, after all, is good business, and who also wouldn’t want their music heard across as many platforms as possible? So the argument goes. So with this in mind we revisit the work of a fabled American remixer who once assumed a vaulted position behind the decks.

The names remixed here catch the eye. Scanning the running order of both discs of Genius Of Time, you find such gilded names as Syreeta, Gwen Guthrie, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Grace Jones (‘Pull Up To The Bumper’), Jeffrey Osborne and Smokey Robinson (‘And I Don’t Love You’). You hear them, but you hear them over-egged, Levan’s agenda, as remixer, to piggyback an artist’s creative wellspring to create an alternative revenue stream for himself. That said, with the volume turned way up, it’s a great collection to listen to, and for two reasons: it’s perfect to dance to, while reminding us of how changing public tastes slowly began to sound the death knell for the bona fide musician.

Billed as “an ideal compendium of Levan’s work as a remixer and producer”, these two CDs play curiously flatly out of a hi-fi; we live, lest we forget, in a sweatless age of iPhone lock-in. So Genius Of Time was a nice historical idea, but it fails to hit the spot. Perhaps get down to a club nearest you that still spins these epic floor fillers, because only then can the heyday of clubland be revisited, albeit vicariously.

Genius Of Time is out now via Universal.

Jason Holmes
@JasonAHolmes