On November 14, an already abysmal few days for humanity took another turn for the worse with the passing at age 72 of David Mancuso, founder of the pioneering New York City venue/party The Loft. Beginning in 1970, The Loft was the birthplace of the New York dance underground from which disco and house emerged and was a place where people could feel safe regardless of sexuality, race or politics. Here, Tim Lawrence, Colleen Murphy, Cyril Cornet and Jeremy Gilbert, members of Lucky Cloud Sound System, who host four Loft parties in London each year and who worked closely with Mancuso right up until his death, choose their five all-time Loft classics.
Stevie Wonder - AS (Cyril Cornet)
A song that epitomises the Loft experience, this track was traditionally played during the final phase of the party when Mancuso would seek to send "people back into the outside world relatively smoothly". Talk about smooth! When the cymbals start being prominent at 2.20 or at 2.49 those keys leading into that beautiful humming on top of big bottom bass: absolutely incredible on The Loft soundsystem. I remember the room effectively moving as one, the groove lifting you up from the inner core of your body, which wasn’t really your own anymore. We were all experiencing the loss of ego right there: one of the most life-changing experiences one can live.
Chuck Mangione - Land of Make Believe (Colleen Murphy)
David often played this 1973 album cut near the beginning of his long musical journeys. I have to be honest, the first few times I heard him play it, I had a hard time getting my head around it as it felt a bit too Puff the Magic Dragon. However, with repeated listens, I have come to love it. With its freeform orchestral folk-jazz feel and psychedelic lyrics it sets the tone for the party as it encourages the release of a childlike spirit.
MFSB - Love is the Message (Jeremy Gilbert)
This is THE Loft anthem. At its best, disco always fused the physicality of funk with the utopian joy of gospel, and this is a classic example. The sweet Philadelphia soul sound is given a new sense of urgency by insistent funk and transcendent brass; the historic debt of dance music to jazz is audible throughout. But above all, as the lyric makes clear, this is a hymn to the perennial philosophy: love is everything, everything that matters, everything that’s real.
Manu Dibango - Soul Makossa (Tim Lawrence)
David Mancuso’s ears were open to the world and this along with his responsiveness to the energy of the dance floor led him to introduce an extraordinarily broad range of music into his parties. One of them, Manu Dibango’s Soul Makossa, an African jazz record with a driving beat and echoey vocals, came to his attention via an African import company based in Brooklyn. The record’s organic, soulful, jazz-inflected energy led it to become a favourite on the Loft dance floor as well as with the DJs who headed to the Loft once their regular gigs were over for the night. When dancers joined the crazed scramble to get copies of the record the majors started to take note and Atlantic ended up releasing the track in the US. The record quickly entered the charts. And because it received no radio play it demonstrated the rising power of Mancuso and New York City’s wider DJ community to break records.
WAR - City, Country, City (Tim Lawrence)
Responding to the energy of his dance crowd, which danced longer and harder than any other in New York City, Mancuso started to search out long tracks that would take his dancers on a journey within a journey. Before the development of the first 12-inch singles, Mancuso selected album tracks such as WAR’s City, Country, City, with the record’s journey from city to country to city operating as a dual metaphor for the different tempos of rural and urban life.
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