Larry Levan
Larry Levan, born Lawrence Philpot on 20 July 1954 in Brooklyn, was an American DJ best known for his decade-long residency at Manhattan's Paradise Garage, a club he began playing at the height of the disco boom in 1977 and which has been described as the prototype of the modern dance club. His Saturday night sets drew a cult following who referred to them as Saturday Mass, and influential post-disco DJ François Kevorkian credited Levan with introducing dub aesthetics into dance music, with Levan experimenting alongside Kevorkian on drum machines and synthesizers within his productions and live sets. After the Paradise Garage closed with a 48-hour farewell party in 1987, Levan struggled to secure a long-term residency in New York, though he also played at Club Zanzibar in the 1980s, a home of the Jersey Sound strand of deep house and garage house, and made occasional appearances in the 1990s at Sound Factory, where Junior Vasquez held a residency. Levan's productions and remixes helped shape artists including Taana Gardner and Gwen Guthrie, and his mixing work appears on releases such as Man Friday and the Peech Boys. He died on 8 November 1992 at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, aged 38, and was inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame in September 2004.