Dr. Micah Salkind is the Deputy Director of The City of Providence Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. As part of his work, he collaborates with large non-profit cultural institutions as well as emerging artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs. He also serves on the boards of the Providence Public Library and Community MusicWorks and is an ongoing collaborator with dancers and scholars in Chicago’s Honey Pot Performance collective and Matthew Cumbie Projects’ “Growing Our Own Gardens” initiative.
A DJ, sound designer, and curator, he is the author of Do You Remember House? Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds for which these oral history interviews were collected. The work "historicizes house music, the rhythmically focused electronic dance sound born in the post-industrial maroon spaces of Chicago's queer, black, and Latino social dancers. Working from oral history interviews, archival research, and performance ethnography, it argues that the remediation and adaptation of house by multiple and overlapping crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that contemporary Chicago house music producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters re-remember and re-animate house as an archive indexing experiences of queer of colour congregation."
Currently, the audio files and biographical information are available; transcripts will be added when complete.
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Interview with Toy 'Tonka Toi' Foster and Victor 'The Dizz' Blackful
Micah Salkind
Foster has been a supporter of house music since her youth, acting as a promoter and producer with the Chosen Few Picnic each year in Jackson Park. Blackful became well known in the City as a radio personality and music entrepreneur when he co-hosted WGCI’s Bad Boy Radio during the early 2000s. Both were avid listeners of hot mix radio as teenagers, noting the critical role that cassette tapes played in disseminating Chicago’s house sounds.
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Interview with Valencia 'Mother Diva' Dantzler
Micah Salkind
Valencia Dantzler grew up on Printers Row near the infamous Importes Etc. record shop that helped establish the use of the term “house music” to categorize records broken by Frankie Knuckles at The Warehouse. A multi-talented media entrepreneur, Dantzler has been an advocate for house music’s acknowledgment as cultural heritage, and a supporter of events like the Summerdance DJ nights that brought house to citywide audiences during the 2004-2006 seasons.
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Interview with Zenzilé 'Zinzi' Powell
Micah Salkind
Zinzi Powell grew up on the South Shore and comes from a family of performers and nightlife entrepreneurs. She attended Kenwood during high school which had a big connection to the preppy disco punk/house scene, and listened to BMX and B96 hot mixes, and partied at underground clubs and juice bars like the Music Box before heading to Florida for college. After she returned to Hyde Park as a young adult, Powell became part of the first wave of audiences to join the Chosen Few Old School Reunion Picnic when it took place behind the Museum of Science and Industry.