Lance Desardi – Jazz Salad [Pacific Coast House]

Dallas native Lance Desardi arrived in Los Angeles with his flatmate JT Donaldson around 1999. At the time I was the head buyer and manager of L.A.'s largest indie dance music store, Beatnonstop, on Melrose Avenue in the heart of Hollywood. We had just released a double vinyl on Beatnonstop and a single on PCH with tracks by Cpen and me on both.

Lance and J.T. were introduced to me by Chris Penny, aka CPen, another Texan based in L.A., and coincidentally both were looking for work. Both had spent about two years in Chicago under the tutelage of Spencer Kincy, aka Gemini, and the "mayor" of Chicago house, Derrick Carter.

I hired them both and we soon became great friends. I lent them equipment and keyboards to work on projects and, all of a sudden, we had a small community of producers and artists making beats and bringing them to the store for "show & tell" sessions.

That created a healthy environment where we all pushed each other to make music for the labels. That's one of the reasons why Seductive, Pacific Coast House and Pacific Traxx, among others, were born, to give an outlet to the various projects and aliases we were managing at the time.

One day Lance came to the store beaming from ear to ear, with obvious enthusiasm. He and another colleague, Jaime G, had entered the studio that week and finished "Jazz Salad". As soon as Lance played the DAT tape and the track boomed through the speakers with Jaime's deep Latin intro, I knew it would be a big underground hit. It has such an infectious groove that it remains undeniable even more than 20 years later.

It's great to see it back on vinyl and not with those exorbitant collector prices over a hundred pounds. On the B-side, "Boing" is a deep early morning groove that fits perfectly in a Mark Farina-style set, with bonus beats included. Not to be missed. A classic.

Text by Sam Robson, Pacific Coast House.