Life Joy Choir’s “I’m So Happy,” for U.K. label Mr. Bongo. Bahar’s love for sharing hidden gems has carried him around the world to DJ since his first overseas gig in 2006. Just don’t ask him to work on the Sabbath. He once turned down a 1997 dream gig opening a secret Rolling Stones gig at Chicago’s Double Door club to observe. These days, he brings mostly 45s to his plentiful overseas gigs.“I show up with needles and records—everything else is just weight,” he says. Japanese audiences, in particular, have embraced his studious approach to mixing. “Every year, I’m here doing a tour, playing disco and everything,” he says from Tokyo, where he’s just about to get behind the decks at DJ Bar Bridge in Shinjuku.“I [shop] on the side in every little town where we are doing the parties—guys I know are taking me to the little spots, and I’ve been killing it at Disk Union and HMV,” he says.“It’s so funny, but some of the real, real deep stuff that I used to play are their classics now.” With a quest for unearthing and sharing lost sounds that seemingly knows no bounds, Sadar Bahar will surely be blowing up undiscovered disco, funk, and jazz cuts—and whatever he damn pleases—for years to come. “Music belongs to the people,” Bahar preaches. “It’s still exciting when you hear somebody play a major cut you don’t have.You meet so many collectors in another part of the world, with a lot of records we never got. I’ve loved it since the beginning.”
DJ. He was pretty plugged in, with his own night at the Music Box, and DJing the WHPK Disco Madness show,” Bahar says. The pair met through Collins’s sister Stacey, who worked at the Music Box and kept hyping her brother’s music. Bahar eventually realized she spoke of Lee Collins, who he was already a fan of, and even owned cassettes by. Spinning what they dubbed “Soul in the Hole Muzik,” Bahar and his cohorts sought out the deepest and rarest soul and disco cuts, turning new generations of clubgoers on to long-lost recordings— an M.O. not unlike the Northern Soul DJs of 1970s England.“We were preserving the old soul, the real music,” he says. “Even back then, we noticed things were changing, turning to [digitized] house music and beat machines. It was good-sounding music, and a lot of us [played] it, and it has stood the test of time—but we were really disco kids. In Chicago, they just called that ‘house music.’” In time, Soul in the Hole expanded from parties to encompass a record label (issuing mix CDs and 12-inch edits), a clothing line, and a TV show that aired on Chicago cable access channel CAN 19. The late Collins, who sadly passed away in August 2025 at age fifty-eight, teamed with Bahar in 2012 to curate the BBE Records compilation Sadar Bahar Presents Soul in the Hole , helping to spread the Chicago crew’s legend to a whole new audience of overseas listeners. More recently, Bahar has teamed with fellow Southside native Marc Davis of Black Pegasus Records on a series of 12-inches featuring re-edits of disco-gospel fusion gems like the Fountain of
( above ) Photo by Vittoria Bozzarelli, courtesy of Sounds Familiar.
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