Michael Peverett: todd terry's show . . . todd terry's show . . .

Monday, June 22, 2020

todd terry's show . . . todd terry's show . . .

Contagious Killer Cuts, CD cover of the Limited Edition Import

Introducing one of my favourite-ever albums . . . but I'm not speaking from a position of expertise, far from it. Todd Terry's Contagious Killer Cuts: Compilation Volume One came out in 1999, but it didn't exist for me back then. (There never was a Volume Two.)

At the beginning of the 1990s I'd essentially stopped following pop music. It was a busy decade for me: young family, love, commuting, long hours, little sleep, debts, emotional highs and lows and highs. I wrote most of my best poems then, but there was minimal time for the receptive side of my aesthetic existence; I read, saw and heard little. (And so far as the last of these was concerned, it was all about rediscovering classical music.)

It wasn't until 2010 I happened across a CD of Contagious Killer Cuts in a pound shop and decided to give it a whirl. I knew Todd Terry's name, I'd had a record of his before. Todd was a big presence in the early days of the New York house scene back in the late 1980s; he comes from Brooklyn but it was in Europe his reputation first took off. (House music had been the last of my pop music passions, before I packed it all in).

Ever since that day the CD has never really moved far from my van stereo: it's 70 minutes of perfectly sequenced hedonistic dance music, a dance symphony. (There's also a bonus CD containing some other mixes; they're good stuff, but it's very rare that I get on to them.) Since I was always driving while listening, and since I didn't really care, through all those years I never tried to find out about this sound journey: who made the music, or why or when.

You can hear all of it here; or nearly all of it. . . Agonizingly, the final (16th) track of the main CD is missing (Jeanine Garcia's "Wildest Dreams"). The other thing to note is that though tracks 1-15 play in the right sequence, the track titles are all mixed up, so every single one is wrong!

*

But let's go back to the beginning. So here's our symphony's opening statement: "Shine On", produced by Tony Moran and sung by Cindy Mizelle.

[Video title is incorrect.]

Tony Moran is another DJ/producer from Brooklyn (and, like Todd Terry, still producing plenty of new music). As with most of the songs on Contagious Killer Cuts, we're looking at a stark gender-role split: male producers, female singers. But don't start visualizing grizzled svengalis and naïve trophies. More typically, these male producers were comparatively new on the block and the female singers were the more eminent artistes, some with established careers that long predated house music: Linda Clifford, Martha Wash, Jocelyn Brown, Shannon, for instance... [Martha Wash (Two Tons O' Fun, Weather Girls) had done all her sisters a service a few years earlier by filing the lawsuit against Sony that led to legislation to make vocal credits mandatory on CDs.]

Cindy Mizelle, from NJ, has also had a long musical career. More recently she's been in Bruce Springsteen's backing band, and you can read more about her here:
https://brucespringsteen.net/band/cindy-mizelle

"Shine On" is a joyous breeze of fresh-air love, its heights all gospelly call-and-response. The snow-capped mountains, melismatic swoops, ripples of "strings", and show-tune key changes all make it a thrilling but somewhat anomalous inclusion (and no doubt that's why Todd sequenced it here at the very start). For sometimes an opening statement can be very different from the interior: like a red-painted house-door, or the famous Db tune at the beginning of Tchaikovsky's first Piano Concerto.

You could say that the moment when Contagious Killer Cuts really starts to be itself is at the end of track 1, when Cindy and the choir fade away into the thunderous incessant drum splashes of Track 2: the "Mike Rizzo Surf Drums Mix" of Wendy Phillips' "Love Never Changes" (neither Wendy nor her tune are much in evidence -- but we'll get to hear them later, on track 10). That segue is the moment, I always think, when the vast scope of this CD and the art-form it represents begins to become apparent. The "Mahler 3" moment.

Here is that Track 2, "Love never Changes" (Wendy Phillips, Mike Rizzo Surf Drums Mix):

[Video title is incorrect.]

For this and the next few tracks it's all about digging in to the details of the rhythmic pulse, leading eventually to the pounding sexual challenge of "Deep" (Track 4, by the House Junkies featuring Linda Clifford); and then comes the first of the album's supreme moments, when this taut r'n'b tension finally surges into the release of chordal progression, in the form of Martha Wash's/Jocelyn Brown's "Something Goin' On" (Track 5), Todd Terry's own composition and production.

Here it is:

[Video title is incorrect.]

Definitely a song that merits sharing twice, so here's a Top of the Pops clip (the song reached No. 5 in the UK), just for the sheer joy of seeing Martha and Jocelyn in action (and Todd in the background).

After that sustained high, Track 6 (Judy Albanese's "You") is the heart-still-racing post-coital afterglow: I thank God for giving me you... (Judy Albanese's spell in the music industry was comparatively fleeting, just seven years or so: she now sells real estate in Rhode Island).

And here it is:

[Video title is incorrect.]

Back in 1999 this beautiful, physical, erotic and timeless dance space existed alongside the street documentary, transgression and fury of hip hop. By comparison its social commentary is more submerged, but it's there, particularly in the two pieces by Sash! (a German production trio): "Movemania" featuring Shannon (Track 8) and "Mysterious Times" featuring Tina Cousins (Track 15).

Both of these were hits in the UK, though of course I didn't know that. Until a few days ago I'd always assumed Contagious Killer Cuts was a wholly New York creation; which is predominantly true, but not altogether.

Here's the sublime DJ Delicious Mix of "Movemania" that appeared on Contagious Killer Cuts:

[Video title is incorrect.]

But how could I not append this? -- the video for Sash!'s original single mix of "Movemania":

As far as I know I'm the only person on the whole planet who rates Contagious Killer Cuts as an exceptionally wonderful album; or even a good album. There are no reviews anywhere, not even customer reviews. It's apparent from YouTube that many of the individual songs are cherished, but the fact is that the "album" is really an alien concept to house music. In the indispensable though incomplete Todd Terry discography on Discogs (207 items and counting) Contagious Killer Cuts appears unobtrusively in the category "DJ Mixes".

Did Todd Terry in 1999 know that he'd just created/compiled/curated a masterpiece? Probably not. But I like to fancy, as its haunting final track fades into a long-postponed silence, that he's singing along with Jeanine Garcia, and reflecting, as I always do: Never in my wildest dreams . . .

Oh yes, that final track. The CKC version isn't available online, but the following version's not too dissimilar. (Jeanine Garcia's name is shown here in its more common spelling of "Janine Garcia".)