Acid Reigns




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October 10-16, 2002

music

Acid Reigns

Fan from afar: ãI think that in Philadelphia people are more prepared to cross-fertilize music,ä says Peterson.

British DJ legend Gilles Peterson loves Philly back.

by Sean O’Neal

When did Gilles Peterson first show signs of the musical innovation he was destined for? Maybe it was when, as a young boy, he launched his first pirate radio show out of his father’s shed. Indeed, a passion for jazz, funk and soul started early for the Swiss-born, London-raised Peterson, who later coined the expression “acid jazz” as a spoof on acid house.

"When I was 15, I was a soul boy," remembers Peterson, now 38. "I had the soul clothes, I wore the haircut, I was listening to Maze records and Cameo records, and then I listened to pirate radio that gave me that music. I went to weekenders where people would go to holiday camps and listen to DJs playing soul records from America. That's when I first heard people like Herbie Hancock, Grover Washington Jr. and Tanya Maria on the sound system.... And so as much as there is no black music in England, there's always been a love for Motown and soul music in a certain way."

With the threat of the government and other competing pirate radio stations, it was no easy task running a pirate radio station in the U.K. during those days. Peterson even had to change his last name to avoid getting caught. If you see his passport, you'll find a different last name.

"I had to be very sneaky," Peterson admits. "I never got caught on that station, but I got caught later on. But we often got caught by the government. One time, when it got really heavy with pirate radio, we got kidnapped by another pirate radio station -- with guns -- called LWR."

As a DJ, Peterson is a dexterous whiz kid with an overwhelming ability to intermingle various genres and generations, records old and new. By November 1998, after "an awful lot of pressure, stress and tapes," the soul-slurping jazz connoisseur and co-founder of Talkin' Loud Records launched one of the world's most popular and integral mix shows, "Worldwide" on BBC Radio One. Then he went on to arrange one of the most notorious jazz/funk/soul mixCDs to ever hit the dance community: 2000's The INCredible Sound of Gilles Peterson. The double-CD (INC/Giant Step/Epic) features the now-legendary DJ-veteran delicately and gracefully interweaving soul and rhythms from artists like Incognito, A Tribe Called Quest, Nuyorican Soul, MJ Cole, The Isley Brothers, Minnie Riperton, DJ Vadim and Funkadelic.

Peterson confesses that it wasn't until the past year that he finally came into his own as a club DJ. Before, he was admittedly "a little bit scared" to experiment with his mixing.

"When you're doing a club set, people are there to have a good time," he contends. "People don't go out all the time. They have to work most of the time.... You've got to make people enjoy themselves. I think it's very easy to become too serious or too self-important when you're playing records, and so I try and smile and enjoy myself. And if I'm not enjoying myself, it's a difficult situation.... I'm really lucky that I've been doing it for years and years and years, and people follow what I do. Therefore, I have more of a chance to do things that are more to my liking."

What's more, one can hardly be jazz- and soul-crazed without having a deep appreciation for Philadelphia's music scene and history. In fact, the reason for Peterson's visit, with support from Radio One, is to gather firsthand information for a documentary he is doing on Philadelphia music.

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"There is something about Philadelphia which makes it more experimental and more musically interesting than other cities where things are far more ghetto-ized and bracketed, and I think that in Philadelphia people are more prepared to cross-fertilize music," says Peterson. "Therefore, you get people like King Britt, you know, mixing with people like Ahmir [Thompson, of The Roots] who's gonna basically be into hip-hop, but also really into jazz, and there's the spoken word thing, and there's the tradition of disco there. And so you've got all those elements, and people don't feel too restricted by what they're meant to be, and they're prepared to experiment which works very much with the sort of ethos and philosophy we have more in the U.K."

Harmony and FiveSixMedia present Gilles Peterson with King Britt and Rob Life, Thu., Oct. 10, doors at 10 p.m., Aqua Lounge, 323 W. Girard Ave., 215-769-5114. For more info, e-mail harmonylounge@aol.com.

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