Joaquin “Joe” Claussell's spiritual vision

A HOME FOR MUSIC

Claussell grew up in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Park Slope, a name that’s now shorthand for upscale gentrification of the skinny latte and double-pram variety. In his youth, however, the brownstone-studded area was home to working-class Black and Latino families.

“It was a multicultural neighbourhood, so it had everything going on; even some things that were not accepted back then elsewhere, but are now. You could be gay or straight, whatever, it was beautiful,” he says.

Claussell’s Puerto Rican-French family — his mother and 10 siblings — trace their roots to the Yoruba people of Nigeria. Music, especially percussion, was a priority in their home. Joaquin’s older brother Larry was a drummer and leader of a Latin rock band, with a full Ludwig drum set and a state-of-the-art stereo system he brought back from an army stint in Japan. A metal aficionado, he got Joaquin hooked on Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Claussell still has a soft spot for late ’60s and early ’70s psychedelic rock. Brother Jackie also had a stereo from army time overseas, and introduced Joaquin to American soul, spiritual jazz, and other, global sounds.

“My brothers weren’t just record collectors, they were record selectors,” Claussell insists. “They taught me how to discern music. We spent hours jamming or listening in our rooms. My mother played music constantly, too: Afro-Cuban, Afro-Latin, Top Forty, those classic Fania records.” Another brother, José, was a percussion prodigy who became the musical director of Puerto Rican legend Eddie Palmieri’s salsa orchestra. 

From the hopping neighbourhood block parties led by brother Larry, it was a natural progression for teenage Joaquin to dive into the world of 1980s New York nightlife, moving to Manhattan where he soaked in different cultural scenes.

“New York was an incredible melting pot for nightlife then,” Claussell says. “I was a mod skinhead at the time, who went to CBGBs and the Mudd Club. I loved punk and the UK stuff coming out, like Depeche Mode and The Cure. I went to Paradise Garage for disco and house, and I would go to mainstream rock and pop clubs, too. I needed to fill my musical palette with every sound.” Claussell had dabbled in DJing, but after his main inspiration Paradise Garage closed in 1987, he hung it up. Walking home from his job as a high-end cabinet- maker a couple of years later, he happened upon the record store Dance Tracks, an East Village spot with a reputation for stocking rare house imports. Something drew him inside.

“I immediately got along with the owner, Stan Hatzakis,” Claussell remembers. “He left me in charge when he went to the bank, and when he came back, he saw that I had sold all these records. From that day we had a bond. I came on as the in-store DJ.”

Dance Tracks was a nexus of the New York DJ scene at the time, with greats like Frankie Knuckles, Deee-Lite, Larry Levan, Robert Owens and David Mancuso popping in to score future club anthems — as well as upstart youngsters angling to make a name for themselves in the burgeoning house and techno scenes. “I met some fantastic people, but unfortunately, I also witnessed egos and how the industry worked from behind my turntable,” Claussell says frankly. “I was happy just playing records. The rest of it didn’t appeal to me.”

Hatzakis had an artistic streak, and sparked what Claussell calls “the unexpected birth of my musical calling,” when he convinced Claussell to hop in a car to Long Island to visit one of his best customers, keyboardist Tony Confusione. Experimenting with “music collages”, their synergy quickly went beyond amateur fiddling; they produced two cult classics under the Instant House name, ‘Over’ and ‘Awade’. 

“Those records magically emerged from our shared, deep love of house,” Claussell reminisces. “I had been watching how Tony and Stan were doing everything during that session, and they said, ‘Why don’t you do a version?’ I was nervous at first” — his production experience consisted of playing around on a Roland JX-8P keyboard and a Teac 3440A reel-to-reel — “but I had probably smoked a little weed, so I jumped in,” Claussell laughs. 

That session was a harbinger of his future production style: tropical percussion over a driving beat, live instrumental solos tweaked with electronic effects, and wide-ranging samples that summoned global cultures. The Instant House tracks were released by New York’s Jungle Sounds Records in 1992; later that year, Claussell heard one of those tracks on the radio when he was in London visiting his girlfriend, and knew he was on to something.

But he wasn’t quite ready to devote himself to production. Instead, he concentrated on Dance Tracks, eventually taking over from Hatzakis and, along with partner Stefan Prescott, transforming the record store. Whereas most shops then were still barebones, aisle- oriented boxes, undecorated save for posters, Claussell looked to flip things into a lounge vibe. “We put in sofas, nice lighting and a full-blown system, so it felt like a club. It was, keep in mind, mostly men shopping in those days, so we had a nice place where their girlfriends and sometimes boyfriends could relax and hang out while the DJs did their thing. It made for a more family-like atmosphere. A lot of stores copied our model.”

The musical force guiding Claussell had plans for him beyond becoming a DJ’s DJ at a groovy record shop, though. He had noticed that, throughout the early ’90s, house music was becoming “harsher, more plastic, more pop”, and yearned for soulful sounds that celebrated individuality and history rather than collapsing cultural identities into a generic beat. And he had creative friends who would call on his talents for more ambitious projects.

BODY & SPIRIT

“Danny and François were regular Dance Tracks customers,” Claussell says of Krivit and Kevorkian, and the origins of Body & Soul. “It was always very humbling to speak with these DJs who had years more experience than me. I was actually shocked when they asked me to throw a party with them.” Claussell resisted at first. “I was content with what I had — turning people onto music, a dope soundsystem — but knowing then what I knew of François, his genius as a remixer, and that my first gig with them would be for a birthday party tribute event to Larry Levan, I recognised that this was a great opportunity that was not to be messed up,” Claussell laughs. “They convinced me. And it was beautiful, you know?”

This openness allowed the trio to create musical space for dub techno, Brazilian samba, Cabo Verdean morna, Punjabi folk, African-American gospel and extended odysseys like Nuyorican Soul’s ‘I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun’ and ‘It’s Alright I Feel It’. In the days before digital music streaming, Body & Soul sets and compilation CDs were messages in a bottle for an international queer, Black, and Brown audience that was eager to dance its way through the end of the grim AIDS era — and into a borderless club future that looked and sounded like their own histories and experiences. The compilations, released from 1998-2007, featured foundational Body & Soul tracks like Dubtribe Sound System’s ‘Equatorial’, Donna Allen’s ‘He Is The Joy’, and Cesaria Evora’s ‘Sangue De Beirona’.

Claussell began attracting attention for his animated DJing, throwing his head back and riding the EQs, manipulating the music into something unique. For longtime house mavens, this is un-extraordinary, but as the internet has amplified his live sets to an unfamiliar audience, it has raised eyebrows (and comments).

“It’s a funny thing about my DJ style, I don’t consider myself a DJ in the traditional sense,” he says warmly. “It’s not a performance or an act. I’m connecting to the voice of the Creator — whoever that may be — and feeding off the energy of the audience.

“I think it has to do with how I grew up at home, where musicianship was held at a premium. When people are playing their instruments, they are speaking the language of music,” he continues. “I hear a lot of critiques of what I do out there, but it’s fine because being criticised is part of this whole thing. It empowers me. I know I’m sincere, and that there’s also a lot of people out there that really love what I do.”

Body & Soul launched Claussell’s public DJ career, and his production side was lighting up, too. “In the mid-’90s, it was getting harder to find records that reflected what I was doing as a DJ,” he says. Claussell started to lay the groundwork for his own label, Spiritual Life Music, which would focus on the organic feeling of house. But as the spirit would have it, he ended up launching two labels at once.

Claussell was planning to run his label out of the back of Dance Tracks when Jerome Sydenham, whom he had met when they DJ’d at chic downtown club Nell’s in the 1980s, approached him. Sydenham was hoping to start his own soulful house label, Ibadan, named after his hometown in Nigeria. He also worked as an A&R for Atlantic Records, which meant he had the “keys to the vault” when it came to the label’s artists. Would Claussell be interested in doing an “extracurricular” remix of one of Atlantic’s holdings?

Claussell jumped at the chance. The result was 1996’s ‘All Loved Out (Love Serenade)’ by Ten City, an exquisite 11-minute manifesto of Claussell’s production direction. “Ibadan wasn’t quite ready yet, and Spiritual Life Music was,” Claussell remembers, “so we released it there, and I thought, ‘Here we go!’” Ibadan was soon up-and- running; Claussell has released several records on the label. Spiritual Life Music has since put out more than 100 releases.

The early-to-mid 2000s saw changes for Claussell — the weekly Body & Soul parties ended in 2002 when Club Vinyl was sold, and he left Dance Tracks before it closed in 2007 — but he’s toured constantly since, and has released popular club records. His 2004 rework of Nina Simone’s ‘Feelin’ Good’ spawned a flurry of interest in the complicated idol, and 2018’s epic ‘Sacred Rhythm Mix’ of Cuban singer Daymé Arocena’s ‘Yambu’ chimes with his spiritual vision. On his ‘Africa Carribe’ series, he dives into the vaults of historic Latino music label Fania Records to “remix, remodel, and re-record” the music he heard growing up. 

In 2010, Claussell opened a record store and community centre called Cosmic Arts, a hub for music, dance and art-making in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighbourhood. Its purpose was to find deeper ways for people to connect over music than merely shopping for it. The centre usually hosts art exhibits, live music, healing drum circles and “cosmic dance workshops”, which hone “the practice of exchanging negative energy to positive energy, through movement and awareness”, Claussell says.

“We had to close our doors for a while, but we’re staying open as much as we can now. There are a lot of people that rely on Cosmic Arts. It’s a refuge, a place where people can go and call their home.” It’s been a natural outgrowth of Claussell’s vision of music’s power. But what happens to a creative life built on physical and spiritual connections when a pandemic forces you inside your apartment for months?