The aptly named “Little Louie” Vega is short. So short, in fact, that if he were a nutter footballer his head butts would be delivered to opponents’ knees. But for DJ/producers stature is important only when it comes to the edginess of their musical output … and being able to see over the mixing desks. Vega’s eminence, in the former particularly, during the Eighties and Nineties, ensures a gargantuan presence on the dance scene.
As one half of the Masters of Work production team with Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez, Vega’s reputation has been built on remixing music from Björk to Simply Red via Thievery Corporation, featuring David Byrne and Madonna. The duo’s eclectic approach to house compositions infused and influenced by a range of genres — hip-hop, Latino, R&B, soul and so on — have had critics positioning them as originators rather than acolytes in a dance-music scene sometimes bereft of originality.
Born Luis Fernando Vager in New York’s Bronx in 1965, “Little Louie” has a musical heritage. His father was a jazz saxophonist, while uncle Hector Lavoe was a vocalist with the Fania All-Stars.
Vega attributes his, and Gonzalez’s, genre-defying approach to living in New York — a “musical melting pot” with a vibrant live-music scene.
Sitting in a Cape Town hotel room, Vega’s passion for any music with a soul is palpable: “I’ve been travelling more in the past 15 years and my music has grown to reflect that. There are now African/Brazilian influences, I’m working on Anane’s [his wife and Cape Verde vocalist] album and really getting into Cape Verde music at the moment,” he says.
South Africa has been a regular stop during Vega’s touring and he considers local house producers — such as Oskido of Brothers of Peace (BOP) and the rest of the Kalawa Jazzme crew — “family”. Vega also co-produced and remixed on BOP’s Zabalaza album, and recently remixed Hugh Masekela’s Spiyanko for the Vega Records Compilation One release: “There is soul in all music, but there is a certain type of sound that makes you feel a certain way. Especially the music that we play and make as Masters at Work, a lot of it is soul music but it could have a Brazilian influence, a gospel influence, an R&B influence, but there is a lot of soul to it. [South African producers] take that idea of soul and put it into their own culture and they mix it with house music and it is amazing how they have combined kwaito and house and a really South African flavour over the past few years,” says Vega, singling out music by BOP and Mafikizolo as especially popular during his sets in Europe and the United States.
The producer who won a Grammy earlier this year for his Remixed: The Curtis Mayfield Collection, believes that performing live with the seven-piece Elements of Life, as he did at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival earlier this year, has “always been a dream” — one that has seen his career “come full circle where I was able to DJ, make music and now do it live with a full band”.
Vega’s previous experience with a live band was the NuYorican Soul project, which saw him working with a big band and artists such as jazz vibraphone player Roy Ayers, George Benson and Tito Puento.
During a time of musical regurgitation, when influences can easily become pastiche and homage, Vega believes that NuYorican Soul was “definitely a homage tribute album”, yet not in the imitative, conventional sense. For Vega and Gonzalez, it was an acknowledgement of physical and musical roots: “It was also a story, it was theatre to me. It is growing up in New York City … Imagine walking past a building and in one window you are hearing Latin music, in another jazz, in another window soul music, gospel, hip-hop, R&B. And that is where we grew up, in neighbourhoods where you really listen to different music.”
About the danger of pastiche, Vega said: “We created a Masters of Work sound within the house genre, but we reached beyond that by bringing together a lot of different cultures and music into house music until it became something where the tempo is varied and it wasn’t house music any more.”
Vega started DJing as a 13-year-old and was approached by music industry suits to remix while DJing in clubs the Eighties: “They were like, ‘Louie, would you like to remix a record?’ and I didn’t even know what remixing was, I was like ‘What? What? … What do you want me to do?’ Yeah,” he says.
The relationship with Gonzalez was born out of a mutual friendship with another house DJ/producer, Todd Terry: “There is a song called Salsa House that Kenny had done on his Dope Wax label — a lot of breakbeats and stuff — and I had heard this tune where he had sampled Cello Cruz and had Sylvester’s I Need You, this classic as well. So he sampled these two songs and made one out of it and I really liked it and I wanted to do a remix of it. And the next thing you know Todd Terry was like ‘Hey, I know this guy! He’s from Brooklyn, his name is Kenny Dope and he works at a record store called Record Centre.'”
Introductions led to hanging out which led to an exchange of beats and music: “He had this hip-hop love for music, while I had this club love for music and I grew up through the birth of hip-hop and played hip-hop in the early days, as well, so we had a lot of things in common.”
Vega was remixing mainly pop artists between 1985 and 1990 and eventually the two got together as the Masters at Work production team: “I was taking these pop artists and doing the remixes and on the B-side we’d do these Masters at Work dubs and just take it somewhere else musically.
“Nothing really to do with the artists, we’d just take maybe a hook from the artists, something that caught us and these tracks — next thing you know — became so popular that everybody wanted one, from Madonna to Michael Jackson, every-body wanted a Masters at Work mix,” he says of their success.
Touring with his multinational group, Elements of Life, and producing solo albums for many of the group’s members is all-consuming for Vega and, apart from reflecting a natural progression in his career, Vega the New Yorker believes there is an element of symbolism in the band performing in a post-9/11 milieu: “I think one of the reasons I did Elements of Life [EOL] was because it was about unifying cultures and bringing music and people together. When you look at the EOL crew it is a family of very talented people performing together.
“I think the message all around is that we need to come together and make it happen, and I think that is the message we try and bring through in our songs … it’s not super-deep political, but it is a message that you can get from the music and the performance: We need to celebrate life and stick together,” he says.
Vega Records Compliation Volume One: Mixed by Louie Vega is available through Sheer Music