DAVID MORALES

In an almost textbook example of the ‘poor boy made good’ story, David Morales has risen from the New York slums to become one of house music’s biggest stars. For Morales, DJing was a springboard to a successful career as a producer and remixer, and today he is widely recognised as the most successful remixer in the world. As a result, DJing has long been something of a sideline for Morales, yet he still plays out regularly all the same.

David Morales was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents in the early sixties. The family lived in a ghetto housing project beset by drugs and crime, so it’s no surprise that the young David should have got into trouble at an early age; he was arrested several times for theft and was even shot at the age of sixteen. He went to a mostly white school in the Guidotown area of Brooklyn where he and the few black pupils faced victimisation from the white kids; Morales consequently dropped out of school at the first opportunity.

His interest in DJing had begun when he heard the DJ hired to play at his junior high school prom. He began collecting records and started out by promoting his own parties, working as a cook to supplement his income. Like many others, it was The Loft and the Paradise Garage that turned Morales on to dance music and, later, house, but he made an important connection by hooking up with For The Record, one of the earliest DJ management companies. His reputation grew until by the mid-eighties he had played every major club in New York.

Another crucial move for Morales was joining Judy Weinstein’s record pool in 1983, which already boasted members such as Larry Levan, Kenny Carpenter, Jellybean Benitez and Shep Pettibone. In 1987 he and Weinstein set up Def Mix Productions, a company designed to manage and oversee studio productions by Morales and those he works with, such as Frankie Knuckles, Satoshi Tomiie and Bobby D’Ambrosio. Weinstein went on to set up Strictly Rhythm, one of the great house music labels of all time, and today she is recognised as one of the most powerful people in dance music, but her partnership with Morales has endured to this day.

In 1989 Morales was recruited as resident DJ at NYC club The Red Zone, a space he occupied for several years. He also began naming some of his productions and mixes as ‘Red Zone mixes’, typically his harder, darker works. The Red Zone Mixes have since been acknowledged as crucial influences on the ‘progressive house’ movement, which originated in the UK in the early nineties.

Morales’ studio work began in the eighties with underground club records, but he quickly progressed into remixing, starting with Instinctual by Imagination, and since the beginning of the nineties he has emerged as the foremost commercial remixer on the dance scene. There’s hardly a major pop act left whose work he hasn’t remixed and, while he has been criticised for this, his remix CV makes for impressive reading whichever way you look at it. Morales has mixed all kinds of records in his time, from obvious dance singles (Technotronic’s Pump Up The Jam, Inner City’s Big Fun, Blue Pearl’s Naked In The Rain), to rap (Heavy D, Ice T, De La Soul), reggae (Maxi Priest, Shabba Ranks) soul/R&B (Toni Braxton, Caron Wheeler, Kym Mazelle) and some of the biggest names in pop and rock, like U2, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and The Spice Girls. At the same time, he is also responsible for some of the biggest club anthems of the last decade, such as Ce Ce Peniston’s Finally, Shawn Christopher’s Don’t Lose The Magic and Alison Limerick’s Where Love Lives.

When it comes to picking one classic Morales mix, most cite Mariah Carey’s Dream Lover as his definitive work. But Morales’ biggest job was probably Michael Jackson’s Scream, which he remixed in 1995. Jackson’s label wouldn’t give Morales the master tapes to work from; instead they flew him out to Jackson’s studio in LA for a week. It’s rumoured that he received a payment of $80,000 for the three mixes he produced, which illustrates perfectly the esteem in which he is held by the record industry.

Generally speaking, Morales’ remix trademarks are tinkling pianos and strings, but he’s best known for working around the vocal material and leaving the song itself relatively intact. This makes his mixes particularly radio friendly, which partially explains his popularity with major record labels. He’ll do dub or instrumental mixes too, of course, but it’s for vocal productions that David Morales is best known.

However, unlike many producer/remixers in dance, Morales has gone one step further and moved into full album production, most notably for Mariah Carey and Jody Watley. His production for Carey’s 1996 album Fantasy earned Morales a Grammy nomination and the partnership worked so well that he also produced her 1998 album, Butterfly, for which he even wrote some material.

Strangely, Morales’ solo productions are rather thinner on the ground. His first rel