It's misleading to refer to Motor City Drum Ensemble's entry in the DJ-Kicks series as "jazzy," which hasn't stopped a lot of people from doing just that. MCDE's output is often described as deep house, and there's a long tradition of deep house producers simply borrowing polite brass and woodwind arrangements from old jazz records and slapping them on top of featureless beats. The results are usually bland, sometimes plain banal. An hour's worth of the stuff, all that polite chugging and all those waxy saxophones, tends to be good for napping but not much else.
That's not what you get here. The mix opens with an eerily swaying Sun Ra tune, which is a pretty good indication that Danilo Plessow's taste in jazz runs more toward the odd and cosmic than the smooth and placid. But aside from the tart Afro-funk horns on the Tony Allen cut, there's really not much here that sounds like jazz of any sort. Even the Sun Ra record more closely resembles a kind of slightly sinister soul music from outer space. Across the mix, Plessow focuses on what makes the best deep house its own animal: fluid bass, swinging beats, and the spaciousness of good dub.
And even then, as long as his choices fit those requirements, Plessow goes further out than you might expect. He often leaves the boundaries of deep house, or any kind of house, far behind. MCDE throws in old-school IDM and sweaty vintage Afrobeat, polyrhythmic weirdo disco and wombing ambient house, classic Detroit-style techno and the outer limits of the genre's Germanic counterpart. Like all the best DJs not bound to a scene, Plessow has managed to locate connecting points between records released years apart and for entirely different audiences, cuts that feature the muscle of live human drummers and rhythm tracks that sound more like computer hiccups.
And yet all of them feel weirdly natural linked together, as if they were always meant to build to this whole, which begins with simmering dub and Afro-Cuban rhythms, moves through a mini-set of warm and ultra-traditional house, and then launches into various kinds of fractured funk experimentation from the 1980s into the 2000s. While staying doggedly mid-tempo, whether it's techno's pulse or disco's boogie, Plessow proves himself a master of pace. And while there are no floor-filling anthems here from any era, it's all too busy and bustling to be called minimal. Like all deep house fans, Plessow chooses tracks in part because they sound so luscious, with every piano and snare drum sounding extra crisp, perfect headphone music. But the bass here is so uniformly rich and powerful and forward-charging that even at its most gentle you never forget this is still music designed to move bodies.
Plenty of DJs have wide-ranging record collections. Rare are the ones who can seamlessly mix between genres without sacrificing flow for eclecticism or excitement for a display of pure technical skill. MCDE's DJ-Kicks is one of those rare home-listening mixes that is stylistically all over the map but feels unified, that can mix records released three decades apart more because they feel right, because they produce sparks. If you're only a casual house and techno fan, this DJ-Kicks won't catch you up on dance music's cutting edge. But if you're looking for one of the best-mixed and most immersive sessions of the year, dance music that's both a head-trip in the dub tradition and unflaggingly funky, this is the mix for you.
