MARSHALL JEFFERSON
Marshall Julius Jefferson was born on 19th September 1959 in Chicago.
Despite being a House music pioneer, his early musical influences mainly consisted of 70's Heavy Metal such as Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin.
Along with a vast swathe of the Chicago music scene in the 80s, the music being played on the influential radio show Hot Mix 5 piqued Jefferson's interest.
In addition to the new sounds he was listening to on the radio, Jefferson had his first introduction to House music through attending nightclubs.
Jefferson was working for the post office when some friends encouraged him to go clubbing with them. The club that particularly caught his interest was The Music Box.
The Music Box's resident DJ was Ron Hardy, and Jefferson was particularly taken with the club's sound system's power. It was loud with a capital L!
Due to work commitments DJing in a club was a distant dream, so instead, he began making tapes and DJing with his friends in each other's basements, occasionally playing at friends' parties.
He soon had the opportunity to purchase some better recording equipment, including a Yamaha QX1-Sequencer, a Roland JX-8P Keyboard, a TR-707 and TR-808 drum machine, and a recording mixer and multi-track recorder.
Jefferson was now all set to experiment in a serious way and soon rose to prominence as a record producer at Universal Recording Studios in Chicago.
At the studio, he was first introduced to Larry Sherman, owner of Trax Records, the label that championed many notable early house artists.
'Move Your Body,' Jefferson's single with Trax, was released in 1986 and became a staple of the House movement.
'Move Your Body was the first house record to incorporate piano even though Jefferson himself admitted that he couldn't play the piano!
He was determined to include piano in the track after being inspired by the Elton John song 'Benny and The Jets.'
His solution to his lack of piano skills was to record the piano at 40bpm and then speed it up to 120 bpm - much more suitable for a house track!
This technique is now much copied in the world of record producing and enables complicated riffs to be recorded note-perfectly at a manageable speed before they are sped up to the desired bpm.
He produced a considerable body of work at this time, with many of the tracks now considered House music classics.
At the start of the 1990s, he decided to focus more attention on DJing. This coincided with the time when the idea of the 'superstar' DJ was exploding thanks, in part, to the rave scene in Europe.
Jefferson had a particular dislike for flying, and as most of his gigs were in Europe, he decided to move to London. There he had a five-year residency with the Tribal Gathering and Big Love events.
At the end of 2020, he announced that he was giving up DJing in protest at the disproportionate fees paid to white DJs on the scene compared to their black counterparts.
He now lives in Manchester and recently released a re-imagined version of his seminal hit "Move Your Body."