Much like many of you, my least favorite form of music writing is that of some boomer prattling on about how much current music sucks compared to some storied golden age–or worse yet, a millennial (my own age) waxing lyrically about turn-of-the-century kitsch nostalgia. To be blunt: time waits for no one. Everyone has to look forward just as much as they’d like to stay backward. As I dig into Joe T.’s Tales From The Velvet Project–an impressive, heartfelt slice of fully formed house music–I think about how this idea is put into practice.
Unless you’re knee-deep into American-created house music, I imagine you have little clue who Joe T. is or why his music matters. And the person tasked with giving you insight into his story finds it difficult to square the circle between his past life as a music creator and his current vocation as a real estate broker. What I do know is that there was a time when Joseph M. Turri, once known simply as Joe T., straddled the line between hip-hop, house music, and various strains of electronic dance music. That his music still exists for us to hear is something we owe, in large part, to connections made elsewhere.
Joe T. is a native of New Jersey but spent much of his youth moving across the U.S., following his father’s work. It wasn’t until his family settled in Boston that he began cultivating his first love–DJing within the city’s hip-hop scene. Only after graduating from Boston University and commuting to New York City to explore its club culture did he encounter–and fall for–the city’s multicultural house scene.
In the early ’90s, Joe shifted from spinning raw hip-hop to digging deep in the crates for house records, quickly becoming a coveted DJ in New York’s major clubs. Working under monikers such as The Bass Foundation, The New Sound Of Soul, and 10BC, he released soulful deep house tracks like “The Jazzy Mission” and “Deep In New York” on his own Magnet Records imprint. He soon caught the ear of Strictly Rhythm, New York City’s storied house label, and released tracks like 1994’s “Half Moon Pilot,” which would catch fire.
It wasn’t until 1996 that Nite Grooves–a label owned by Japanese-born house maven Hisa Ishioka–convinced Joe to collaborate with Louie “Balo” Guzman, of “Don’t Shut Me Out” fame, on his first full-length statement under the name Lil’ House Gangstaz. The result, Extra Large: The Album, straddled the line between club-centered classic house and the newer electronic “hard house” rave scene, exemplified by tracks like “Freak E.” Those ties between Joe T. and figures within Japan’s house scene would ultimately help preserve his first and only true solo full-length in a meaningful way.
Joe’s connection to Japan came through Tommy Wada, who helped found Magnet Sounds before becoming president and A&R at Strictly Rhythm. Wada eventually returned to Tokyo to cultivate its underground music scene, launching a new label–Ruffcut–both at home and abroad. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first artists he sought to sign was his friend Joe Turri.
One listen to Tales From The Velvet Project makes it clear why Tommy heard something in Joe that could translate so seamlessly between audiences. DJs often remark that the main difference between Japanese and American dance clubs lies in where the audience faces. In Japan, club music is made for those who want to listen as closely as they dance; it’s customary to face the DJ. In America, club music often becomes the backdrop between you and the person dancing with you. Somehow, we dance to separate ourselves from the DJ. Tales From The Velvet Project weaves these dual impulses together, letting each inform the other, linking parallel sensibilities into one continuous arc.
Recorded entirely in Joe T.’s studio in “Udah Hill,” New York City, Tales From The Velvet Project sounds like it wasn’t made solely for the dancefloor, but also for those finding their own floor at home. Interstitial dance vignettes titled “Udah Beats” recall the homespun experimentation of producers cracking open their first digital audio workstation. Fully realized tracks like “I Told Ya” spin tribal and house motifs into fiery, club-ready deep house that feels distinct from many of Joe’s contemporaries.
Hearing what felt like a truncated double-vinyl vision reconfigured onto a Japanese-pressed CD is oddly liberating. Vinyl purists shackled to self-imposed gatekeeping might miss the fuller arc presented on CD to Japanese audiences who carried no such baggage.
Released at a time when DJs were trading turntables for CDJ media players, albums like this make a compelling case for that evolution. The thumping “Let Me Go” commands the higher dynamic range of the CD format. The exploratory acid groove of “The Way You Make Me Feel” would risk losing definition in the muddiness of a flawed vinyl press. Tales From The Velvet Project argues for hearing every detail and texture of a track like “Saturday Night” with clarity–whether at home or in the heat of the dancefloor.
It’s the small details of the Japanese pressing that fascinate me most. The sequencing places the stunning “Love Comes Down”–a floating ambient house track–closer to the end, where you instinctively crave the comedown. Just before it, “Across 25th Street” injects you into that feeling: a brilliant slice of jazzy house underlining a certain melancholic edge that often lingers in Joe’s memorable work.In the end, Tales From The Velvet Project sounds like a personal love letter to the architects of the music that first inspired Joe’s own dalliance with house by saying, “here’s where I’d like to take it from here.”
In the original CD liner notes, Japanese DJ Shotaro Maeda describes the album as imbued with the “seventh sense he has absorbed through the filter of the club”–that “seventh heaven” he once felt as a teenager discovering house music in a Nishi-Azabu apartment. When you need something that delivers the “true comfort of house music,” I find myself agreeing with Shotaro: this is a perfect reminder of what we shouldn’t lose track of and full credit to the Japanese side on figuring this out.
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