THE JOHNNY FRIGO SEXTET

Frigo composed and recorded albums from the late 1960s through to the early 1970s for Giordano and his Chicago-based Orion record label. Giordano set up the label to provide music for dance classes. The music was required to be heavy on percussion and rhythm, so Frigo filled Giordano's classrooms with a mad mix of rock, jazz, Latin, and funk to move to. If only school was always that good!

Back then records were used to provide musical background- so there are original Orion albums floating around collectors and second-hand vinyl stores- but naturally they are extremely hard to find. Fortunately the Luv N' Haight core vinyl-collecting crew were able to unearth the whole Orion collection with the help of Joe Bryl (or Chicago's Funky Buddha club) and Gus Giordano's son Mark. Once the catalog was completely tracked down the Ubiquity crew, along with DJ Egon (chief rare groovester at Stones Throw Records) and Cool Chris (purveyor of rare vinyl sounds at San Francisco's Groove Merchant Record Store) boiled down the albums to a list of their favorite tunes.

"Collected Works" features the hip cool-jazz sound of "Gazebo", the raw-funk cover of "Scorpio", and more than your fair share of drums, odd sounds, percussive excursions and a couple of rare groove monsters all just waiting to be sampled.

DJ Egon interviewed Gus Giordano and Johnny Frigo for the liner notes. Here are some excerpts touching down on why the music came to be...

"At the time, there was no jazz dance technique, or jazz dance music going into the dancing schools. This is why I contacted Johnny Frigo to do the records," Gus remembers. Johnny's wife, Mara Lynn Brown, was one of Gus' dancers. Through her, Gus contacted her busy husband. "Gus said he wanted a group of records done for his dance class. This was in the mid 1960s", Johnny recalls. "He'd already instructed his students to records he liked. So he hired me to get a group together to copy some of these records. I rearranged them, made up different melodies with the same amount of bars in the same style. It was a strange combination of rock, jazz and little Latin flavor on some of them. The whole idea was a lot of rhythm." Gus adds, "The dancers didn't have live percussionists in the schools. They were exposed to very percussive music, very accented music, very jazz music. But most schools in America, except the big ones, only had a record player, that's why I did the LPs.

Johnny and Gus took varying approaches to the music they created. Johnny regarded the sessions as another day on the job: "I don't remember a note of the music. I was in the studios all the time. I wasn't into fusion at all. But when you're a studio player, you wear a lot of hats. That's a hat I wore."

Gus, on the other hand, appreciated different aspects of the emerging rock and funk scene. "My ear was more academic, but it was always progressive," Gus offers. "A lot of dance teachers stay in the same groove all the time. They're afraid to go out of it. Not me, I progressed." Thus, Gus gave Johnny Frigo songs by Lalo Schifrin, Galt MacDermot, Sly Stone and Dennis Coffey to rework for his classes. Frigo responded with music that met the expectations he had hoped for on his LP some 15 years earlier, though as he states now, "I don't even think I knew what the word 'funk' meant."

Gus recalls the creation of Orion records: "It was a crazy scene. I would bring these dancers down and we would dance while Frigo recorded. We were the ones that actually drove the musicians. The drummer was always the lead instrument. Always. And the drum and bass solos would follow whatever the dancer was doing at that point. We'd have to dance quietly though!"

Most of the pieces were short and to the point, such as Gus' signature piece- an organ based cover of Coffey's drum heavy "Scorpio".." "Wherever we went, if we performed, we always did 'Scorpio,' " Gus remembers. "We had 'the whiplash', a release of the head that went on in between the beat. And the arms are flailing around. We'd take one of those breaks and put the whiplash to it." When asked what attracted him to 'Scorpio', Gus answers with the mentality of a 20 year old hip hop DJ: "I think it was the breaks. When you have that, it's much easier to choreograph. The music tells you something: it relates that feeling from the soul".

Gus Giordano continues to teach master classes all around the world. For the past decade he has been the founder and executive director of the International Jazz Dance Congress. Coincidentally the IJDC is holding an annual meeting in Chicago mid-2002. Gus Giordano's Jazz Dance Chicago continues to perform worldwide, and Johnny Frigo continues to perform, including gigs at the Green Mill in Chicago.