The choice: Ron Trent

You’re lost in the waves of the crowd, the muddle of the previous DJ’s marching rhythms still washing round your head. Dancefloor disorientation in the early morning… from the second Ron Trent begins playing you’re aware that this is something distinctly different. The basic rhythm boasts so much more space, the electronic expression of a drum kit swinging. As each element of percussion is slowly added you realise they pinpoint the movements of your every limb, joint and digit in response to the music. Your body feels more loose, more free, your dancing more expressive. This, even before the devastating bassline is revealed, before the chords submerge you into fathoms unknown by most music calling itself deep house.

This is the sound of Prescription Records, of African rhythms filtered through Chicago’s drum machines, the sound of unmistakably black American dance music. That its layers of percussion should prove so irresistible to movement can be attributed to the DJ, Ron Trent, being not only a percussionist (like his father) but first a dancer.

“Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy, Timmy Regisford, François K, Danny Krivit, David Mancuso, Joe Claussell, Louie Vega,” he says, “some of these people are my friends and contemporaries, but I’ve also been a fan. I’ve grown up and listened to a lot of people, primarily as a dancer on the floor. That’s how a lot of people know me, too.” While some club audiences in Chicago, his home town and New York, where he lived from 1997 to 2002, may well know Ron Trent as a dancer, to the rest of us he’s known as a music producer and, to many, their favourite DJ. Often he’s mentioned in the same breath as Theo Parrish or Omar S by aficionados of authentic, individual, contemporary American dance music. In person he’s a relaxed and intelligent communicator, frequently smiling. His face shows so few signs of ageing that it’s surprising to hear that he’s in his mid 40s; his breakthrough came in 1990, when he was 18, with the release of Chicago anthem ‘Altered States’, a track he had produced four years earlier on equipment pooled by neighbourhood kids including Mike Dearborn, who were part of a minority that appreciated the city’s then emerging house music.

“Let me be clear, it certainly wasn’t for everybody,” he says of early house music in its birthplace. “It was very much associated with being gay, which was very much more of a hush-hush thing back then compared to today. So it was a very underground scene, very artistic. Growing up as an urban heterosexual kid, this was something that was very different. Mendel High School was about three blocks away from me. They were famous for having these parties where the likes of Jesse Saunders and Frankie Knuckles would come and play for teenagers.”

Inspired in particular by the Jamie Principle tracks ‘Waiting On My Angel’ and ‘Your Love’ as well as by Larry Heard, Ron Trent’s production career continued with releases on Clubhouse, where he was made in house producer under the guidance of Hula and Fingers (of Indo ‘Are U Sleeping’ fame) and Cajual, before an introduction by Carl Bias of Master C & J to Chez Damier would change the pair’s destinies forever. With the club having closed, Damier had just finished in his position as manager and Saturday night resident of Detroit’s Music Institute club, made famous as a testing ground of the city’s emerging techno sounds by chief Friday night resident Derrick May. Damier had taken a new job with Kevin Saunderson’s KMS label; Saunderson had an extremely well equipped studio, having reaped the benefits of Saunderson’s recent success with Inner City. Finding much common ground in their conversations about music, Trent decamped to Detroit and began a production partnership with Damier.

“When I reflect on Detroit, it was the fact that there was nothing else going on. It was very quiet,” says Trent, who would often sleep at the KMS studio. “You were either working, sleeping, eating or fucking. That was it.” The duo’s efforts would be nurtured at KMS but, following the release of a hi-fidelity dub mix of their track ‘The Choice’, it would become crystallized, from 1993, with further explorations into sonically similar directions on their own Prescription label. “We wanted to raise the bar, to raise the fidelity for music coming out of Chicago and the Mid-West,” Trent says of their revered deep house imprint Prescription. “We felt that Chicago was synonymous with a lot of really raw tracks. We wanted to take that idea and expand on it, take the big track and put it into a big studio. What does it sound like if we do this? Getting into the different dynamics of producing, combining strong melodies with strong rhythms.” Damier’s talents included sampling, singing and the running of a label, whereas Trent’s strengths lay in percussion, keys and the studio mastery he’d enhanced at KMS. Between 1993 and 1996 Prescription became the premier deep house label, unrivalled in fidelity and ideas, a 90s successor to groundwork laid by the likes of Larry Heard and Nu Groove Records. They released music by Derrick Carter, Roy Davis Jr, Romanthony, Pevenn Everett and Glenn Underground (plus one of Moodymann’s first releases, on sub label Balance), but it was Trent, either solo or in partnership with Damier, who made the biggest waves, with ‘Morning Factor’ and ‘Pop, Dip And Spin’.

The pair went their separate ways in 1996, with Damier taking Balance and Trent keeping Prescription, where he embarked on an odyssey of epic club tracks in which he attempted to marry the electronic with the organic. But it’s their era of partnership that’s remained the best loved, the most collected and most talked about and which makes up the bulk of inclusions on current six-LP compilation ‘Ron Trent presents Prescription: Word, Sound & Powe’ (Rush Hour). Trent’s career since has never ceased evolving. He’s explored afro house, undertaken a famous DJ residency in New York for Giant Step and launched several new labels such as Future Vision, Electric Blue and chief current concern, MusicandPower. His latest projects include a second ‘Dancefloor Boogie Delites’ album, a Romantic Flight album, co-production of the punk funk outfit A Band Called Flash and work with vocalists including Tkumah Sadeek and former Motown signee Donnie, studio-based work with musicians having become like second nature to him over the last two decades. As a DJ he stands out for his depth of knowledge as a selector and for his concentration on blends. “I play using my filter in the best way to tell my own story,” he says. “Because that’s what a DJ is supposed to be: a storyteller.”

‘Ron Trent Presents Prescription: Word, Sound & Power’ is out early 2017 on Rush Hour