Chicago house producer Roy Davis Jr. makes no bones about his belief in the afterlife–it’s been a theme in his music since 1995, and last week he informed me that “what’s important to me is getting to the kingdom.” Musically speaking, though, Davis has already led several lives in the last decade and a half–few dance music figures have been able to reinvent themselves as often or as successfully as he has. This week the Montreal-based Bombay label released Traxx From the Nile, the first CD of original Davis material to be released in North America and a good glimpse into the 31-year-old legend’s current direction, “soul electrica”–a soul-driven sound that helped launch England’s thriving speed-garage scene.
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In Pierre’s garage, the teenage Davis witnessed firsthand the birth of acid house. Pierre–known to his mother as Nathaniel Jones–would soon form a group called Phuture with fellow producers Earl “Spanky” Smith and Herb Jackson. They recorded a new track using a quaint but key bit of technology: the Roland TB-303, a rudimentary bass synthesizer with a pitch shifter. They took a tape to the Music Box, the club where Ron Hardy was spinning a mix of disco, European electronica, industrial, and tape manipulation that was expanding the audience for house–a predominantly gay crowd–to include straight black south-siders. He played Phuture’s tape, which rapidly gained popularity, and by 1987 the premier Chicago house label Trax had released it as the 12-inch “Acid Trax.” Though the group had no idea at the time, the 12-inch soon crossed the Atlantic, where its slow hard beats and writhing rubbery bass lines were appropriated by the founding fathers of rave culture.
That same year Pierre left the group, moving to New York to kick off a successful solo career. He got a job doing A and R for Strictly Rhythm, and when Davis followed him a little later, the label hired him too. In 1994, feeling that he’d sufficiently established himself as a national name, Davis returned to Chicago and began focusing on his own work, producing tracks that drew generously on classic soul, with more emphasis on vocals and melody. Part of the reason for the shift was that he had something he wanted to say: he’d been raised as a “god-fearing child, going to church every week,” and he’d gradually been investing more in his faith.
Thanks to Davis’s relationship with Bombay, which is distributed in the States by Caroline, his label now has its own distribution deal with the company. Next year Davis hopes to take full advantage of it with four separate album projects–the first of which will be a new mix CD–and a steady stream of singles by him and other producers. In addition to doing remix work for artists like Gus Gus, Eric Benet & Faith Evans, and Mary J. Blige, he’s also contributing music to the sound track of a sequel to the Wesley Snipes vampire flick Blade. He also hopes to perform in Chicago before the year ends.
