Francois K., Joe Claussell and Danny Krivit are the resident DJs of New York venue Body And Soul. Francois als runs the Wave record label, where he sometimes reiussues classic tracks like Disco Dub, Together Forever, Journey ...
Francois Kevorkian on Meta Soul: "[...] very interesting and detailed site about dance music and dub aesthetic."
Francois was born in Rodez in France on January 10th 1954. His father worked at the ORTF, the French national radio and television broadcasting organisation, as a sound engineer. His mother was a dentist. They separated early in his life, so Francois stayed with his mother until he was thirteen, after which he went to live with his father. In spite of these early disruptions, he managed to graduate from the Montgeron Lycee in 1972. He went on to attend college for a year at Lyon, where he planned to study for a biochemical engineering degree but got expelled for starting a general strike. He wasn't unduly bothered, however, because he had become so involved in music that he had already realised that biochemical engineering wasn't for him. His parents begged him to try again, so he studied pharmacy at Strasbourg, but it got worse - all he did was play the drums in various bands when he should have been studying.
"Well actually, most of the time I always quote I became a DJ in 1976 in New York, but actually I had some experiences DJing in France much earlier, in 1974, but it was not the same kind of DJing. After I had quit that second year of college in Strasbourg, I stayed in that city 'cause it was a very cosmopolitan city, between Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands and France, there was all these people passing through. At that time, 1974, we in Europe were just getting the sort of late version of the hippy culture that happened in America. So I stayed and got a job for a year in this bar/restaurant/club where they wanted me to play music, but it was supposed to be ambient type music because the bar was for drinking, and if I got people up dancing the bar owner got upset. So I was playing the things I liked for not dancing to, like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Yes, King Crimson, Soft Machine, which was very big at that time, and of course Hendrix and all these sort of hippy-related kinds of music, kinda intellectual things. There were two turntables, but there was no mixer, there was no cueing 'cause you just changed decks when you wanted to change records, so you just put the record on, put the volume up, and that was it. "
"The real DJing started when I came to New York in September 1975 to further my career as a drummer. I met a black guy in the street that I made friends with who invited me over to his club to show me what he did with his DJing. He had, like, a nice mixer with headphones and everything, and I didn't understand what the mixer was 1cause I had never seen it before. At the time I think he was trying a very primitive way to slip cue the records without really blending them on top of each other. Well, he let me try a little bit and I was like, ‘Wow, wow, what is this?1 1Cause at the time this wasn't an accepted thing, this was a very underground thing. After that, I started getting with small little bands here and there and doing like R&B covers on like Chaka Khan, James Brown and records like that, but I fell upon pretty hard times in the winter, say February, of 1976. So I found a job and got hired by this really big club to play the drums on the dance floor while the DJ was playing, and the DJ got pretty pissed off about that, he really didn't like it, but he couldn't say shit about it 'cause the owner wanted it that way. The DJ there was the legendary Walter Gibbons, who at the time was the hottest property around - Kenny Carpenter also worked there on lights, he must have been seventeen at the time. Walter mixed Loleatta Holloway with 'Hit And Run', he did the first commercial 12" 'Ten Percent' and all those things, so I had to learn pretty fast, within a couple of days, to play the drums to all these records that I did not know, and it got to be a bit of a fight, where he would play all these drum solos to try and get me out. Unfortunately for him, I knew all the solos, but also at the same time it was like an enlightenment for me, 'cause while I was playing the drums to the music, I could hear what Walter was doing with the records.
"Eventually the club closed down and I moved on to another couple of clubs, one of which was called Experiment Four. I got a job there just doing like the kitchen and the cleaning, towel boy or whatever to try and get the owners to give me a job as a DJ. The DJ already there was a guy named John "Jellybean" Benitez, and we made friends very quickly. This gave me access to a tape recorder and I started to figure out how to do editing by myself with like scotch tape and scissors and started creating my own little medleys of all the hot things of the moment by taking the breaks and repeating them and blah blah blah. So even though I wasn't a DJ with an active job at the time and I hadn't actually played yet, I would give Jellybean some of these things. But then I realised it was much harder for me to get a job as a drummer as opposed to a DJ. For me being a musician and drummer, I understood exactly what they were doing, how they were doing it, why they were doing it, and what I could be doing. And then I also understood what it is that I could be doing that they didn't know, which I felt I could bring on top of that musically, to make it more exciting. Anyway I would bring Jellybean some acetates of my medleys from this little place that I would go to called Sunshine Sound and get known as the guy who was doing these plates. Through that I kept bugging Jellybean to let me fill in for him on a party or whatever. Then one Sunday Jellybean told me that he didn't want to work because he was tired - he was the house DJ of that club working every day - so he faked like he was sick or something and finally the owners got me to work and that was my first gig"
Francois Kevorkian, exilŽ a New-York depuis 1975, reflte ˆ lui seul l'Žvolution de la dance music depuis le boom de la disco. Producteur, DJ, musicien, mixeur, il est l'un des pionniers du groove global et planŽtaire. Il dŽmarre en 1975 en jouant de la batterie dans un club new-yorkais puis devient DJ un an plus tard. En 1978, il est nommŽ directeur artistique du label phare de la disco, Prelude. Au dŽbut des annŽes 80 il plonge dans l'electro et connait la consŽcration en 1986 en participant ˆ l'album "Electric CafŽ" de Kraftwerk. Depuis il a travaillŽ avec tous des grands noms de la pop (Erasure, Yazoo, Depeche Mode) et il a surtout fondŽ en 1987 son propre studio ˆ New York, Axis. 1991 marque son retour au DJing aux cotŽs de Larry Levan ˆ Tokyo. Enfin, en 1995, retour au dancefloor et ˆ la production underground grace ˆ la crŽation de son label Wave.