Pal Joey

• Genre: Deep House

About

Pal Joey (aka Joseph Longo) came up in the heady days of New York street culture, amidst B-boying, boom boxes and an unusually entrepreneurial spirit of beat-making. Beginning with crude "pause tapes," he was soon making tracks with drum machines and sampled vocals, all painstakingly assembled with razors and reel-to-reel. Working at Vinylmania, where Larry Levan might be found shopping for records in his pajamas, helped Joey's entrance into the city's nascent house music scene, and he was soon working with everyone from KRS-One to Sade to the Orb, whose "Little Fluffy Clouds" he tweaked for stateside tastes. True to his city's inclusive spirit, Pal Joey consistently blurs the lines between disco, house and hip-hop, dropping scraps of old soul and recent rap alike over his skipping drum patterns and head-nodding keyboard lines. Joey's records (under his principal moniker and also aliases like Earth People and Soho) have appeared on Jive, Epic, Talkin' Loud, Wave and Coco Machete; he also has run three labels of his own -- Cabaret, Foot Stompin' and Loop D'Loop.

- Philip Sherburne