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 Jacquelyn 'CQQCHIFRUIT' Guerrero
Micah Salkind
Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero is a multi-disciplinary artist uncovering the complexities of Caribbean heritage and queer identity through ornate visual art and captivating musical performance. Also known as CQQCHiFRUIT, Guerrero has DJed, performed, and exhibited across Chicago, the US, and internationally. Guerrero is Miami-born and Chicago-based, is a cofounder of TRQPITECA, and Registrar at Hyde Park Art Center.
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Interview with Jesse De La Peña
Micah Salkind
Jesse De La Peña is the host and producer of Vocalo’s “5 O’Clock Mix” and the “Friday Night DJ Series”. He’s the founder of the Vocalo’s DJ Collective, “Quest 4 The Best” DJ Competition and the Know Chicago music series. He also curates special music programming that highlights artists that are meaningful to the Urban Alternative experience. A member of Chicago’s music scene since the mid 80’s and key contributor to the city’s early hip hop, house, and dance music community as a DJ, musician, event promoter, music retailer, he is co-founder of the Grammy nominated band Liquid Soul.
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Interview with Jesus 'Roy' Bryant
Micah Salkind
Dancer and house music aficionado Roy Bryant was one of the few straight kids who made their way to the original Warehouse at 206 S. Jefferson.
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Interview with Jevon Jackson
Micah Salkind
Jevon Jackson was a rebellious rocker kid growing up in the late 1970s on Chicago’s South Side. His first exposure to house music came courtesy of a neighborhood friend, DJ Mel Hammond, who hipped him to a Frankie Knuckles cassette. Having started his high school career in 1986, he was too young to get into The Music Box, or the Power Plant, but Jackson was listening to the tapes, as well as BMX mixes; he was already learning how to spin records too. Jackson’s first club was The Powerhouse at 2210 South Michigan. By the late 1980s, He was checking out sets at big ballroom parties spun around Chicago by Armando, Gene Hunt, and DJ Rush. As the scene and sound on the South Side became more hyper-masculine and tracky in the 1990s, Jackson followed DJs like Diz to the North Side. Red Dog, Shelter, and the Milwaukee Ave. loft party scene became his home for the next decade. He would eventually play residencies at Shelter, Red Dog, Smart Bar, Neo, and Crobar, while hosting wild underground parties on Aberdeen and traveling abroad. In 2000 Jackson became the musical director at Mad Bar after playing there as a resident. He continues to play in his musical bloodline around the city.