www.mawrecords.com
Biography:
“Little Louie” Vega is the Miles Davis of dance
music. Like the impossible to categorize Davis, Vega is
constantly reinventing himself and revolutionizing music
itself in the process. During his nearly two-decade long
career, Vega has crafted some of the most innovative singles
in dance music history (“The Nervous Track”,
“It’s Alright”, “I Feel It”
and “You Can Do It”), kick started genres like
soulful house (“Beautiful People,” “I
Get Lifted”), and revitalized the careers of legends
like Roy Ayers, George Benson and Tito Puente.
Born in the Bronx in 1965, Vega grew up
surrounded by Latin music. Vega’s father, Louie Vega
Sr, is an accomplished jazz and Latin saxophone player and
his uncle Hector LaVoe was a renowned salsa singer who recorded
for the Fania label. But Vega’s musical influences
didn’t end with Latin music: in the eighties, he was
a regular at legendary nightclubs like The Paradise Garage
and he attended Afrika Bambaataa’s parties in the
Bronx River Projects.
In 1985, Vega began his first nightclub
residency at Devil’s Nest, in the Bronx, Roseland,
Studio 54 and the Palladium. Vega’s style reflected
his eclectic upbringing: his DJ sets included everything
from Latin music to hip-hop to British new wave. But towards
the end of the decade, Vega became disenchanted with the
club scene’s increasing musical segregation. “People’s
minds were starting to think in terms of categories,”
Vega remembers.
Luckily, at the very same time Vega saw
clubland’s creative lights dimming a bit, his soon-to-be
production partner Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez was
throwing wildly eclectic mobile parties in his Brooklyn
neighborhood and cobbling together productions under the
“Masters At Work” moniker. By 1987, the Masters
At Work name attracted so much attention that Todd Terry
borrowed their name-and their style-for the New York house
classic “Alright, Alright.”
Terry, in turn, introduced Gonzalez to
Vega and the two found an immediate kinship. Masters At
Work productions soon began to take off. Innovative house
remixes for the likes of Tito Puente, Saint Etienne and
even Debbie Gibson quickly put the duo at the top of the
underground dance music heap. And Vega’s influential
“Underground Network” party at Sound Factory
Bar in New York created the template for many a soulful
house party to come including “Body & Soul”
and yielded house music anthems like Barbara Tucker’s
“Beautiful People” and River Ocean featuring
India’s “Love & Happiness”.
Yet Vega and Gonzalez were still restless,
so they created a new project called Nuyorican Soul. With
its jazzy horn blasts, ambient soundscapes and wildly arrhythmic
percussion, Nuyorican Soul’s first single “Nervous
Track” pushed the boundaries of dance music even further.
The Nuyorican Soul album, released in 1997, was even more
innovative, bringing together gospel divas like Jocelyn
Brown, latin soulstress India, hip -hop DJ Jazzy Jeff and
soul legends like Roy Ayers under one roof. Like Daft Punk’s
Homework, Blaze’s Ten Years After, or Roni Size’s
New Forms, the album permanently altered the course of dance
music.
Louie Vega has now embarked on his most
ambitious musical journey yet, with his explosive upcoming
full-length solo project, Elements of Life. Featuring such
artists as Anané, Raul Midon, Domingo Quinones, Albert
‘Sterling’ Menendez, Dimitri From Paris, and
many more, Vega has broken ground, yet again, in this gorgeous
musical collage of languages, cultures, and ideas, with
no borders or inhibitions.
