Little Nobody – Jass Muzak (Wyndell Long Remixes)

Chicago is not just a windy place, the largest non-coastal U.S. city, or the undisputed home of house music.

Andrez Bergen, an Aussie music journalist who did his post-grad uni thesis on industrial music in Britain in the 1970s, partially cut his DJing teeth on the Chicago output of labels like Relief Records, Dance Mania and Radikal Fear in the mid ’90s. But Andrez also has a lingering affection for the Chicago-style jazz rooted in traditional jazz and blues from the deep South, and his long-time favorite musician is Chicago-born drummer, Gene Krupa.

So, for his latest Little Nobody exercise in gripping, tech-seared introspection, Andrez went back to these “roots”, deconstructed the rhythm patterns of early jazz percussion, and reconfigured the outcome into the glorious freestyle techno-philanderings of ‘Jass Muzak’.

No shock that, remix-wise, Andrez turned to one of his favorite contemporary Chicago DJ/producers, Wyndell Long – a man who’d previously worked with Mike Dearborn and popped up on superb labels like Peacefrog, Djax, Pro-Jex and Primate.

But Wyndell then surprised us all by responding with not just one brilliant remix, but two. “I wanted them to keep the main original sounds, but be rooted in the classic Chicago sound – without sounding too crusty,” he assessed.

His superb stuff is the real deal, our cup of tea for sure; we have to say that both mixes absolutely rock, and together form a purist taste of Elektrax Recordings material.

“It’s nice to be able to get back into the funk and have some fun. This is the kind of stuff I like to spin,” Wyndell says.

Simple as that.