T racking down Sadar Bahar is like trying to chase a hurricane. The Chicago DJ—known for his vinyl sermons spanning disco, house, gospel, and beyond—is so on the move, he’s already toured Japan for an entire month this year, and it’s only January when we connect. So, when I got a hold of him by phone from his hotel in Tokyo, we chatted furiously about coming up in the primordial Windy City dance music scene, his inspirations and collaborators, and the sounds that are currently catching his ear. Bahar was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1968, and reared on the Southside of Chicago.“I was still a babe when my mom moved us to Hyde Park,” he says.“My uncle was Elijah Muhammad, who was running the Nation of Islam.When we left Newark, we stayed at his place. He had a couple of nice houses in the Pill Hill area. So, we headed south to Ninety-Second and Bennett.Tyrone Davis lived on the next block, and Curtis Mayfield was down the street.” As a lad, Bahar grew up with the holiest of R&B artists like Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, and Minnie Riperton on his turntable, but he also pulled in different influences from different members of his family.“My older brother liked a lot of rock, so he was stuck on, like, Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’ and ‘Moby Dick’—and he hated my music,” he says.“I can listen to his. I just like music! When I got older, and was going to parties at the Music Box, [Ron Hardy] would be playing stuff like the Who’s ‘Eminence Front,’ and I was like, ‘I know this stuff!’” It was through his father, a guitarist, that he developed an interest in record collecting, learned about jazz, and got his first access to music equipment. “He had a bunch of Fender amps and all that in the basement,” Bahar remembers. His father’s gear would, quite
literally, give his DJ career an explosive start. “As a teenager, I blew all his speakers trying to hook them up to disco equipment,” he recalls.“A Fender speaker caught on fire at one party. I was like,‘Oh no!’ We were seeing folks like [Chicago sound system operator] Dwayne Woods with all these big speakers, and it looked like some stuff I had at home. I didn’t realize [it was] not.This was equipment for what my pop was playing.” Bahar’s neighbors in Pill Hill also enhanced his musical education, especially an older neighborhood DJ named Charles Breckenridge. “He was right on the next street, and a little older, so he hung out a lot with Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk and Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley, who were in our neighborhood, too,” he says. “I knew Farley before he had turntables, DJing over at [Chicago steppers DJ] Eric Taylor’s house.We used to all come down there and meet up.” While Bahar had early access to a who’s who of Chicago party legends, it was Breckenridge, beloved as Charlie B in the local roller- rink scene (Bahar is one amazing skater, according to his pals), who took the time to show him the ropes. “He had the Technics 1200s and this oldTeledyne mixer,” Bahar recalls of his early mentor’s setup. “When we got started in the morning, he’d be spraying thatWD-40, then [he’d] show me how to separate the records at the beginning, try to phase them, and get them both exactly the same.You’d hear like a little airplane sound come in—now they got a button to do that! He’d be playing imports from Italy, stuff like Alexander Robotnick and Gaznevada ‘I.C. Love Affair’—records that Frankie Knuckles was playing at the Warehouse, and on WBMX. Everybody felt like that was kind of like their little secret cult, but then, after a while, it really started growing.”
( opposite ) Illustration by Steve Krakow. Exclusive print available on Waxpoetics.com.
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