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by Andrew Mason LEARNING TO MOVE A CROWD DURING THE GLORY YEARS OF NEW YORK’S ANYTHING-GOES UNDERGROUND DJ SCENE AND GOING ON TO FOUND HIS OWN INFLUENTIAL DANCE PARTIES, DISC JOCKEY DANNY KRIVIT ULTIMATELY LEFT HIS MARK WITH AN ENCYCLOPEDIC CATALOG OF SUBLIME RE-EDITS.
You could hardly ask for a more apropos guide to New York club culture than Danny Krivit. Bred in the city’s downtown scene, Danny’s personal history precisely parallels the emergence of club DJing. To attempt to summarize it requires ludicrously long sentences: From the band-focused scene of the ’60s—when as a kid his world included Mingus, Hendrix, and the Young Rascals—to the heady adolescent days of the ’70s— when the rules were being written at underground hotspots like the Gallery and the Loft—through the growing pains of the ’80s—where as Danny Rock he spun alongside Flash and Bambaataa at the Roxy and filled in for his friend Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage—and on to recent years—where his parties (Body & Soul and 718 Sessions) are integral parts of a fully grown global dance culture—Danny, like a hip Zelig, has been at the epicenter. His father owned a Greenwich Village hot spot called the 9th Circle where Danny played musical selector and was steeped in counterculture from an early age. In 1975, the elder Krivit branched out and opened a dance club on Hudson Street in Tribeca known as Ones, a hustle hot spot that regularly drew movie scouts looking for dance-scene extras. By this time, Danny’s passion for music and record collecting was in full bloom, and the enthusiastic response he got during his two- year residency as Ones’ sole spinner confirmed he was on the right path. At the dawn of the ’80s, as the flame of disco flared and faded, Danny began to specialize in a particular arcane musical art—the re-edit. In its basic form, the re-edit consists of a simple rearrangement of an existing piece of music, but like many things, the art lies in how it’s done. With the rare ability to
hear music from the perspective of the most dedicated dancer combined with the technical know-how of a lifelong DJ, Krivit was able to coax incredible performances out of records whose potential was only hinted at in the original. When you hear a song and wish that cool part was a little longer, or at the front of the song instead of buried behind three cheesy choruses, you are tapping into the same consciousness that Danny used to create his legendary edits. Perhaps the defining mark of a Danny Krivit edit is his respectful and passionate treatment of the original material. It is a spirit that combines the reverence and spirituality of David Mancuso’s nights at the Loft with the knack for drama and energy of Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage performances. Many of Krivit’s personal edits were pressed on the New York City gray market and subsequently became essential material for working DJs, in many cases supplanting the original recordings on the strength of their superior arrangements. The extent of his work is just beginning to be recognized, as these edits were almost always uncredited, appropriate for a fellow who always put the song first and kept his ego well in the background. When Krivit and fellow heavyweights François Kevorkian and Joe Claussell founded Body & Soul in 1996, it was not surprising that the weekly party became world-renowned for representing the essence of this same spirit. Krivit continues to channel this vibe for the faithful at events around the world, nights that anyone interested in dance culture should experience. Here he flips through twelve selections from his vast library and gives Wax Poetics a look into the memories they evoke.
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( opposite ) Danny Krivit in 1978. Photo courtesy of Danny Krivit.
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