11. Mark Farina

11. Mark Farina

Mark Farina is a great house DJ. This is as close to a fact as you’ll find in this countdown: he’s been doing it longer, and better, and to the acclaim of more people who know, than just about anyone. From London … to Chicago … to LA, as the song goes. If it’s been done on turntables with house records, it’s been done by Mark Farina.

And yet, in a strange twist of fate, those of us who, really, really, love Mark Farina’s DJing don’t want him to play house music. We want ‘Mushroom Jazz’. That was the name he gave to his mixtape/CD compilation series, his legendary Monday night residency in San Francisco, and more importantly to his invention of a new way of DJing.

It was a simple idea: instead of playing hip-hop records like hip-hop DJs do, with short, sharp mixes between songs punctuated by scratching and live ‘sampling’ with the cross-fader, Mark would play hip hop records like house records, drawing out the groove, emphasizing repetition and playing 2 and 3 records together in extended blends.

Simple, but, er… HARD. For one: hip hop records are not made like that. They don’t offer extended sections of isolated rhythm, so you either have to be really good at using two copies of the record to extend the groove, or you have to have an instrumental verison of the track. This latter option presents a different danger: instrumental versions of hip-hop tracks are terribly boring. As musically brilliant as much hip-hop production is, it’s almost always designed to profile the rap, and as such it never goes anywhere. Those little motifs just can’t stand on their own.

But Mark Farina can make them stand, jump, pirouette, and run a marathon. His Mushroom Jazz sessions were both entrancing and utterly compelling. They required a DJ willing and able to be constantly in the mix, creating something new from raw materials and never losing control over the direction of the music. The club became a phenomenon (on Monday nights!) – a place where you had the legitimate sense that new ground was being broken. The groove was positively enormous, and he would spike it with extended vocals from Craig Mack or De La or the J5 and we would dance for hours at the edge of the dancefloor, shaking our heads at the unbelievable brio, sure we were watching our generation’s Dizzy Gillespie cut loose.

http://soundcloud.com/djmarkfarina/mushroom-jazz-24-mix-tape-side