Kenny Dope

After Dark:
Kenny Dope
Following a vibrant month of house music that has seen Jerome Sydenham and Dimitri from Paris behind the decks at Yellow, the club will kick off February in fine style with a visit by the man behind Masters At Work and the highly successful Nuyorican Soul project.

Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez heads up the Tokyo installment of MAW's release tour for its new album, Our Time Is Coming, just out in Japan on Avex Trax.

If the album sees anything like the success that greeted MAW o the Nuyorican Soul project, look for it to be a top pick of DJs from New York to Ibiza throughout 2002. In his role as producer for those projects with MAW partner "Little" Louie Vega, Gonzalez has shown an unerring ear for programming the choicest beats, whether in house, hip hop or Latin styles.

Gonzalez first got his start in Brooklyn, where he began to organize a series of parties under the Masters At Work alias in the late '80s. Coming to the attention of Brooklyn hero and future collaborator Todd Terry, Gonzalez began to issue tracks for the cutting-edge Nu Groove label, culminating in the release of the dancefloor hit "Salsa House."

At about this time, Gonzalez also launched a productive relationship with Vega, with whom he later recorded the massive Nuyorican Soul album. The album was clubland's answer to the crossover success of Latin acts like Ricky Martin, and brought Latin sounds to a widerdance music audience.

In between various collaborations, Gonzalez has also been busy with a solo recording career, scoring hit after hit, including the 1995 smash, "The Bomb! (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind,"which featured a sample from the band Chicago's "Street Player" and got himinto legal trouble. "That shit sold so fast it was unbelievable," Gonzalez recounts on his Geocities website. "We were like 'Yowww! We got a problem! Sample clearance!' Everybody was saying, 'He sampled Chicago!' The press didn't realize it, but they were destroying me! The shit ended up costing me $30,000, and that's a lot for dance"

Meanwhile, the following week in February another New York DJ with associations to Masters At Work, Frankie Feliciano of Ricanstruction records, is slated to top the bill at Yellow in a party entitled Mix The Vibe. In a recent interview on the Masters At Work website, Feliciano recalled a 1998 Yellow gig as his best ever.

"I've been everywhere in the world and the only place that I've desired to go to is Tokyo," he said. "I played in Tokyo one time in February '98 the gig itself was hot, it was at that club Yellow. I was playing deep, deepstuff you would think you would only be able to hear at Shelter at five in the morning. The hands was up in the air, they were feelin' it. I was like, this is it, this is what I am doing it for. It's worth 15 hours on a plane."

Masters At Work@Yellow, 2/2, 10pm, ¥3500. Tel: 3479-0690. www.club-yellow.com
Mix The Vibe@Yellow, 2/10, 10pm, ¥3500

Image: Masters At Work