Tucked away in the windy city of Chicago, one of the wildest subgenres of Dance music was born and took the world by storm. Slowly but surely, Juke music went from the underground house parties to world music festivals and it all started with a handful of experimental DJs. At the forefront was DJ Gant-Man. Before becoming one of the founding members of Teklife with DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn, he had established himself as a prominent House and Juke DJ/producer. We caught up with the staple of the Chicago Dance scene after he recovered from New Years' Eve to discuss the early start to his career and the ups and downs he's seen since then.

Did you have a good New Years' Eve?

(Laughs) Yeah, man. New Years' Day, I was tired and worn out but I had to make it happen. New Years' Eve I played a lesbian party. I didn't know what I was walking into. They loved it. I played everything, from Deep House to Juke and some Hip-Hop. More women than men!

You didn't know ahead of time?

Nowadays, it's going to be a little bit everything. You gonna have all races, all ages, and all sexual orientations. I only played for an hour but I ended up kicking it.

That leads into my first question. Do you get booked to solely spin House or Juke music?

That's the crazy part because when I first started off in my career, there weren't that many different genres of House. You just had House music. Also, Hip-Hop and R&B--whatever was dancefloor music popular on the radio--when I started DJing, you had to play everything. When I started producing tracks and making mixtapes, a majority were House and Juke. Promoters started booking me to play that. That's what got my name known the most for. Promoters would call me and say, "Hey, Gant. This is more of a House oriented party. I want you to play House." Every now and then, I'll DJ a lounge or a bar. I may have to play some old school Hip-Hop or some kind of Pop music. Any party I DJ, I have to play some kind of House or Juke. Personally, I don't like to play this new school Hip-Hop or R&B. I like the beats but it has no substance.

So you grew up being comfortable switching genres like that at a party?

When I first started DJing, I started on the college radio station.

When you were 10!

Yeah, I was 10. The program director, his thing was: "Play for the majority of the people, not the minority." At that time, this is 1989, there was no division between House and Hip-Hop. That was the beginning of the golden era for House and Hip-Hop. As I started making tracks, House was the thing. You'd play more House at house parties than anything. If it was a four hour party, three hours of it would be House music. The other hour would be split between the current Rap music and slow jams for the ladies to dance with the fellas to. It wasn't Juke at that time. Once Ghetto House and Juke came in, it was still an all night thing. 85% Juke music and 15% between Hip-Hop and R&B.

How did you know what that majority was like at 10 years old?

I had to get trained. It also goes back to my mother. She always played and had records. She had turntables and she would go from one record to the other. My brother, he's older than me. He's the first DJ I ever met. I got introduced to the whole lifestyle of mixing and music when my brother was DJing. I was 5 years old. When I got to the radio station, I got taught how to play it--knowing when to play songs at certain times, beat matching, counting BPM, knowing your bars. And learning how to play for a crowd. We were doing 30 minute mix sets so you had to get the right songs in the right amount of time.

 

The story of [...] footwork, which all came from House music, that's a success story in itself.

 

I feel like that's missing in commercial radio now where DJs would challenge themselves with a mix and incorporate certain songs in a certain amount of time.

Very much so. The program director was so big on challenging the major stations. The station only had 250 watts so maybe you got half of the south side of Chicago able to listen. If we got anywhere from 150-200 listeners, that's great! A lot of people didn't know I was a kid. When they found out, it really brought more young people to listen. There was a lot of amateur mistakes and learning but he gave us an opportunity to show our skills and keep us interested in something other than playing video games and hanging out in the streets. That was the very beginning of Gant-Man. The art of mixing mattered. When they did do a cassette tape or a DAT (digital audio tape), I think some DJs were on reel to reels. Even those mixes, the pre-planned ones, they had a real essence to it. You couldn't have a sync. You had to put a finger on the pitch control and hold it there, even if you edited it.

That's pretty amazing. I feel like one environment that was important to the growth of Juke music was the roller rinks. Describe that atmosphere to me.

Of course, it started off as going to skate to music. I don't know who was the first promoter to start saying, "We want to have a dance party." Whoever did that, kicked it off. It had to be the 80's. I remember being about 11/12 and going to the Rink Fitness Factory. It was on 87th street on the south side of Chicago. They had the skate floor and a smaller floor to dance. It would have a DJ set up. This one DJ, DJ Lil John, he was a House DJ. I remember him playing House music but it was more of the Jack track House music--more Acid House, underground, gritty stuff, like pre-Ghetto House. Records like Steve Poindexter, "Work That MotherFucker." Records by Armando, Mike Dunn, Fast Eddy. Kids used to go crazy off that. I can't really explain. It was a whole new division to House music.

So they were immediately drawn to it?

Yeah. It wasn't the House music with vocals and instruments when House was "progressing." Late 80's early 90's, here comes a sound that was different which led to people like DJ Deion, DJ Milton, DJ Slugo. They were making their own tracks--different kind of tracks we weren't hearing on the radio. This wasn't on vinyl at the record stores. These kids would come out to listen to other genres too, but they would really come out to listen to what we call now, Ghetto House. This was happening around '92, '93. I had my first residency at the roller rink like the Fall of '94. I just turned 15.

 

"I call Ghetto House the bastard child of House music."

 

Was it a goal to DJ there?

I went there several times for school trips and my friends knew about it so we'd go together. I had played house parties and backyard parties at 11/12 years old. The rink is when I had a weekly spot and learned how to rock crowds. To play these unreleased records, and this is when Dance Mania Records is going full fledged with putting out Ghetto House music, the kids would go crazy. It was straight up hood music. Not every song was about hood stuff and samples that was derogatory but it was all of the above. It wasn't only the words but it was the beat, the synthesizer, the bass, the tom-toms, the claps. I can't explain it. I call Ghetto House the bastard child of House music. It got to the point where mixshow radio DJs would have to put on a couple hits. It was amazing to see it crossover to the clubs and radio.

I can tell how excited you are about its growth as you're describing it but yet it's something that's still somewhat underground or peripheral to mainstream music. You said in an interview that a lot of young people have abandoned it.

You can play Juke or Ghetto House at clubs that play all kinds of music. It will go nuts. If a DJ sneaks it in, it's Chicago bred music so they'll always be excited to hear it. But the fact that the kids birthed the sound, I'm really referring more to my generation. When I was coming up, everybody loved this sound, from 10 years old to 25 years old. As I got to 19, 20, 21, a lot of the kids I grew up with started going to clubs. It wasn't Juke all night at the clubs when you're 21. The DJs couldn't play Juke all night. It became more like, "Aw, that was some stuff we liked when we were kids. The music is getting faster and different." The promoters were like, "No juke," at the so called "upscale" clubs. The music did get you rowdy. I think us, not having a club for 21 and up… no promoter said, "You all should have a night." At the time, early 2000's, those DJs weren't playing Juke. It ended up going to the rave scene and Europeans. Some of the people would end up going to the clubs and just listen to Hip-Hop but it never overpowered Juke or Ghetto House.

That makes me think of the track you did with Kid Sister. When I first was introduced to Juke, I never thought of a Hip-Hop crossover yet you did it really well. How did that combination come about to you?

We were making a lot of Ghetto House tracks in the early 90's. A lot of us had a love of Hip-Hop. We're producers so side projects would be making Rap beats. I always liked the fusion of the double time. I actually got that from Paul Johnson. He was doing R&B samples with House tracks. It was the chemist era because we were all being scientists. Tracks were different from regular House music. We used to say, "Play some tracks." When you say, "Play some tracks," that means, play some tracks that are unorthodox and underground. We were all creative and knew how to do more than one thing. They ended up broadening production. They would take a 65, 70 BPM song and then double time it and take Hip-Hop samples or acapellas and match that. You could get a good Ghetto House song from that like "Thuggish Ruggish Bone." The 12" had an acapella on it.

I also used to make breakdowns with half time beats for my Juke tracks. In the 2000's, I ended up getting acapellas from Maurice Joshua because he was doing remixes from major labels. He liked the Juke sound that I was doing. After about a year of sending in remixes, one song, Beyonce's "Check On It"--he had the acapella because he was doing Destiny Child's remixes and he won a Grammy for Beyonce's "Crazy In Love" remix--I end up making a Hip-Hop beat for the verse and a Juke beat for the hook. They picked it up and put it on vinyl so I'm the first producer in the Juke genre to have a remix on a major label with the #1 woman in the game. Officially, I made that fusion of Juke and Hip-Hop with that record.

Speeding up the Hip-Hop acapellas makes me think of Kanye's signature early production with high pitched voices.

We would do that, too. If you really liked a song to sample it, you were gonna make it happen, regardless. We were trendsetters for a lot of the industry people, whether they know it or not. Hands down, there's a lot of Dance music from Chicago influenced in Hip-Hop. There were other people around the world were making different sounds and I can't say that nobody else was coming up with something similar but we just have soul. There's something about Chicago having soul.

Let's get into that trendsetter mindset with the start of Teklife. Why did you, Rashad, and Spinn decide to start Teklife?

The first name was Ghetto Teknitionz. That was Rashad and Spinn. They came to me since we were all keeping Juke alive, hanging out, and making music together. We don't have any weak links. Rashad was mixing on WKKC with me, so I met him when I was 11/12 years old. He came to the radio station because he heard I was DJing and he was interested. His older cousin came up and told me, "Watch out. Here comes another young DJ." Rashad's energy was all about, "I'm gonna be a great DJ." I saw that then.

Spinn and Rashad got me inspired to keep going. I was making House music under Gant-Garrard. They had a young generation of kids, who stuck with it. We put out CDs and played parties while kids were juking and footworking. Rashad was the gorrilla glue to this. Tek-life is a collective, but it is Rashad. I was like the big bro. I was the popular guy in the 90's so being them made me more popular to the new generation.

What makes Juke so unique to me is that there's a dance movement, footwork, that's attached to it and grew with it. Has footwork's growth changed the way you DJ or produce music?

It's crazy. Every question you asked has a story to it. Even though the tracks back then weren't 160 BPM and weren't called footwork tracks, you had Ghetto House, Juke, House tracks that would make you want to footwork. There were dancers in dance groups making up dance moves. There were a handful of guys who would do solos and display what you got. Doing certain dances with your feet turned into the motion. I don't know what made them decide to move their feet that way. I saw it in the early 90's. It wasn't as intricate as it is now because the music is faster. They just focused on what you could do with your feet.

Now you have to have a certain speed and program the beats that got coined into footwork. With my production, I've evolved and I know how to do more than just one type of music. My first official footwork track was '07/'08. I learned that style from Spinn and Rashad. It was different to me. But the footwork scene was bigger. You'd have 200-300 kids footworking. Japan has a footwork crew and it's deep. They're having dance battles and sessions. That's the craziest thing. The story of starting with Ghetto House going to Juke going to Footwork, which all came from House music, that's a success story in itself.

As someone who grew up with it, where do you see it going from here?

I'm pretty sure it can go mainstream. I'm hearing songs in Hip-Hop and R&B like The Weeknd and J.Cole, who has a new song "Hello" on his new album, that you can hear it in there. It sounds like some Footwork and Juke to me!

Have you listened to Azealia Banks' last album?

I actually just got up on her. I checked out her album and yeah, exactly. It's like she got a producer from each subgenre of House music in Chicago. I can't just give Chicago 100% of the credit. House came from Disco. The way it's going, it has to hit mainstream.

Since you do all of this fast paced music, I have to ask, does Gant-Man do anything slow in life?

(Laughs) That's a good question. I'm known for Juke more than anything. Even with House music, my tempo starts at 120 BPM (laughs). If you're gonna get Gant Garrard or Gant-Man, the slower stuff is gonna be just under 140 BPM. I've made Hip-Hop beats that are like my hidden secrets. I always wanted to produce Hip-Hop beats. I had ideas and I was ahead of my time. Part of me didn't have confidence to put out my left field stuff and part of me didn't have an outlet to put it out. I'm fusing music at a slower tempo.

 

It's still underground but it's global underground.

 

From traveling the world on many tours, what have you learned?

It's a different energy from Chicago vs. other parts of the United States vs. Europe and other parts. One thing remains the same--the love for the music. You're gonna get your diehard fans in every city. Every club and crowd is different. Some people in Europe like certain tracks that we make vs. what I'd play in Chicago. That's the main thing that I've learned is what people like more. The beauty of traveling is getting to meet fans in different parts of the world who appreciate your music more than the people from where you come from. You get to see different cultures. It's still underground but it's global underground.

Last Call

1. What is your favorite movie of all time?Oh man, I can't pick a favorite. I have a problem with all times.

2. As a young DJ, who was the one DJ you looked up to?My brother. That's how I got my start. He called himself T-Man. That's pretty much where I got Gant-Man from.

3. As a DJ, what's your biggest pet peeve?People bothering you while in a middle of a blend. Too many people in the booth. People tapping me while I'm DJing. So too much going on, overall.

4. What is your current DJ set up at home?I still got the 1200's but I don't have them hooked up. I got the NuMark mix decks and CDJ 800's. I got a throwback--Pioneer DMJ 600. I also have a two channel Pioneer. To produce, I use an MPC 2500 and a 2000 XL. I still use analog modules like outboard hardware and as far as software, the main thing I'm using is Ableton. I also have Logic and Reason but I don't use Reason that much anymore. I dabble with Logic. A bunch of VST's and audio units for the software.

5. What's your favorite record of all time?Mm mm mmm. Frankie Knuckles, Louie Vega, Kenny Dope, and Ron Hardy. If I could have an in depth conversation with them… I met Little Louis but I never got a chance to have a deep conversation with him. I have a love for the music and the genres. It can't be one artist, one genre, or one song.

If you're behind, catch up on the Juke and Footwork scene on Teklife's website. Stay up to date on Gant-Man/Gant Garrard's shows and releases on his Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube.

Bryan Hahn wants you to practice safe juking. Don't juke yourself now. He's on Twitter: @notupstate.