Over the past 25 years, the name Gilles Peterson has gradually become synonymous with his self-styled ‘worldwide’ sound and his eternal quest for the perfect beat. Coming from French-Swiss parentage in South London, Gilles worked his way up the greasy pole of the music industry, taking on lowly jobs at record labels and setting up his own pirate radio station, to eventually become one of the most revered tastemakers in the UK and beyond. His emergence during the ‘acid jazz’ years combined with his own Talkin’ Loud and Brownswood labels, legendary DJ sets, and globally popular radio shows have made Gilles a leader in his field. How to describe the music in that field was always the rub, though. Bass heavy, soulful, cutting-edge, often tropical, and always with a jazz flavor doesn’t read easily as a genre type and yet he’s managed to create an underground swell of broad, diverse music that has come to embody the man himself.
Having known Gilles personally for the best part of two decades, it was with a combination of familiarity, excitement, and trepidation that I entered the fabled Brownswood Recordings’ basement one morning in the summer of 2013. Familiarity because I’d visited a number of times before, be it to deliver him some new releases from my label or to have a cup of tea and a chat about the Arsenal; excitement because during all those visits, I’d never had the time, or to be more precise, Gilles had never had the time to sit down and go through his favorite, significant and most rare and interesting records; and finally trepidation because I knew only too well how disorganized the man’s record collection could get and how bad he is at looking after even his most treasured vinyl. But that’s Gilles!
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