Opening Chicago's Jungle Book,
Finding a Brave New World

From the inner city streets of New York to the bedrooms of suburbia, America has caught jungle fever, and we're not talking about the inter-racial themes of an early '90s Spike Lee movie.

Instead, years later, it refers to a form of electronic music -- also called "drum 'n' bass" -- which is making waves with audiences from the UK to the USA and many places in between. Once confined within to dance clubs and all-night parties in the States, d'n'b is now seeping into Joe Public's household via TV commercials like those for Levi's and Lexus. Popular recording artists like David Bowie and the Beastie Boys are also brassing-up their music, with the 1997 release of Earthling from the former and a re-mix of "Intergalatic" from the latter.

In Chicago, the city known as the birthplace of house music (jungle's predecessor), d'n'b is unsurprisingly highly regarded. In fact the Windy City is considered to be one of the most advanced jungle cities in the nation.

The Birth of the Breakbeat

Jungle music is the pride and joy of England. During the late '80s, a large number of illegal warehouse parties emerged in Britain and alongside it came a party generation that made dropping ecstasy (MDMA) an extracurricular activity and dancing till dawn a way of life. This was England's call to assemblage -- the beginning of the rave, a new British movement led by pill-popping kids fighting for their right to party. As party organizers learned to operate more carefully to dodge the police, the subcultural movement moved forth, and so too did the music. While the early DJs spun mostly Chicago house tracks, by 1991 the sound of the underground became the breakbeat (a rhythmical pattern made by stretching short musical passages or 'breaks' in records). This soundtrack of urban Britain was dubbed UK Hardcore -- sped-up hip-hop breaks, a more manic beat, and a doubly menacing, harsher sound. Forgoing the 4/4 beat of house and techno, it instead used an accelerated breakbeat. It took only one year for hardcore to penetrate into the UK mainstream, and as it progressed, the style transformed to what we call jungle today.

Michael Shum, a graduate student at Northwestern, is one of the key figures in bringing the UK sound to the stateside foreground. Shum (a.k.a. Snuggles) is a d'n'b DJ and producer, the co-owner of Forte Recordings (a d'n'b label) and the silky-smooth voice behind WNUR 89.3 FM's "Strictly Jungle Show." His show, which celebrates its fourth anniversary on the airwaves this month, broadcasts Friday nights 11 p.m. to midnight. It was the first weekly d'n'b radio program in the nation, with a who's-who of jungle making guest appearances on his show, like UK selectors Goldie and Zinc, and residents including Slak, Casper, 3D and Ry-n.

Shum, 27, first plugged into UK hardcore while he was living in Houston in 1992. Moving to Chicago the following year, he joined forces with the few breakbeat aficionados in the city, namely JJ Jellybean, Phantom 45 and RP Smack. Shum alongside Jason Berry (a.k.a. JJ Jellybean) produced Chicago Hardcore Authority (CHA), a fanzine promoting the UK hardcore scene.

At that time, UK hardcore was blacklisted on most party lists. It was music no one wanted to play at nightclubs and raves because it was considered undancable. Promoters shied away from booking the DJs, and the party kids were thumping instead to the steady pulse of the four on the floor of house and techno.

"Nineteen ninety-three was the year people were experimenting, and the tracks were absolutely off-the-wall," recalls Shum. "Each track was totally different. Some tracks couldn't follow what the rhythm of the beats was, and they were hard to mix because the beats were so crazy. Compared to that time, now you can mix tracks in your sleep -- they're that simple. You had to have very singular taste to get into it back then."

"There was a lot of posturing then," adds Berry, 25. "We thought everyone should listen to us, and CHA was our attempt to reach people who liked the tunes. We all wanted to think we were bad boys. It was like we were shouting at the top of our lungs. We knew we were ahead of our times as critical as we were of anything not jungle or hardcore."

Jungle Warfare

After only four issues, however, CHA folded. As the music slowly became more respected within rave circles, instead of spending Saturday nights working on their publication, they were now spinning at the first all-jungle parties in Chicago like those thrown by Ripe Productions and Jungle Ting.

"No one could have predicted that the music would have lasted this long, and gone through so many mutations," says Shum. "It's more accessible now. The beats are simpler, and so it's easier to get into." He says the music has gone through around ten complete metamorphoses since 1991 - from styles dubbed "darkside" to" hardstep", "intelligent" to "techstep." Popularity, he says, reached a new high in 1994 when samples of ragga (a form of reggae characterized by vocals 'chatted' by an MC over instrumental rendition of the music) were weaved into the tracks. The style, a marriage of ragga's vocal lines and jungle's rhythms, was called 'ragga-jungle.'

"It seems everyone came out of the woodwork then," says Berry, citing the emergence of many of the junglist in today's scene like Chicago's Dr. Groo and Danny the Wildchild. "It was then, that people began to understand the music.

"The fun thing about the music is that it keeps changing," he adds. Ironically, it was this precise reason -- the new direction the music was heading -- that prompted Berry to leave the scene. By the end of 1995, when 'jump up' (jungle with hip-hop samples) was blowing up, Berry took his abrupt exit.

Unlike Berry, however, the core of Chicago's old school junglist are still active in the scene. "This is a group of people from five years ago, who are still doing it. That says a lot about what this music means to these people," says Scott Manion, head of Dubshack, a d'n'b promotion outfit located in Wilmette. Dubbed by the Illinois Entertainer as "a night where dancing isn't so much required by involuntary," Dubshack's Brockout events are the only d'n'b club nights that haven't died out in the Windy City. Every third Thursday of the month, Dubshack presents their 21+ jungle affair at the Liar's Club on 1665 W. Fullerton, with a rotation of Chicago's finest d'n'b DJs. They celebrated their second anniversary yesterday.

Manion came up with the idea of throwing a club night after a trip to England with his wife almost seven years ago, during the peak of the hardcore insurrection. Entranced by what he witnessed at the clubs overseas, Manion decided to import the same atmosphere home. In 1994, he founded Dubshack, and two years later Brockout was initiated "My model is 100 percent drum 'n' bass," says Dubshack's frontman. "The rave scene served the younger kids and we wanted to find those who have graduated from that scene. I wanted a club that would do something that a rave would."

Commercial Crossover

But with all the new attention generated from the media, many supporters of d'n'b feel as if their music was being emasculated, stripped away of its street-smart attitude and remade as a consumer-friendly product. Ignored for years, now advertisements were making jungle's breakneck beats comfortable for the untutored ear. This was such an odd twist of change that it left many in the scene uncertain how to react.

"These days everyone likes jungle," says Stephen Hindman, 26, one of the scene's leading producer/DJ known as Kingsize. "It's 'hip,' 'new' and 'trendy,' so it sells hip new trendy products well. Still no one can handle more than 30 seconds of a jungle track. They think it's 900 bpm [beats per minute] mumbo jumbo or something."

Hindman, a Midwest transplant, moved to New York City because of its growing jungle scene. Like the strongholds in Chicago and San Francisco, New York has made a deep impact on the stateside scene. Home to major American jungle labels like Liquid Sky and Sm:)e, the Big Apple has also attracted UK labels like V Recordings and Trouble on Vinyl to release their music on US labels. With America being one of UK's largest jungle markets, British DJs are readily coming over, their labels are doing U.S. tours, and a tighter connection between the two scenes has formed. America, it seems, is on the upswing.

This popularity is also echoed on the west coast, where Evan Roth and partners Sean Stearman and Chris Ritter have opened up the area's first d'n'b record store. Compound Records, located in San Francisco, was created according to Roth, "to give jungle a physical location" in the state. "We started Compound Records because we felt jungle needed a real home here," says Roth, 25. When he moved to San Francisco four years ago, jungle, he says, was nowhere to be found. "Now there's something going on almost every night of the week here. There are a lot of kids out here involved in the scene. It's pretty awesome."

Everyday Junglist

Because of this influx of jungle, Danny Garcia (a.k.a. Danny the Wildchild), has made jungle his full-time job. At only 21, Garcia has built up a reputation in the scene as jungle's turntable whiz kid, working magic with vinyl that leaves the crowd screaming for more. "It's crazy," says Garcia, a Chicago native, "Everyone is picking up on jungle these days, that it has now turned into my occupation." Like many of his colleagues, Garcia has hooked up with several booking agencies to keep track of his countless bookings across the states. "If I'm not out at a club, I'm home producing tracks. It never stops."

Fellow Chicago junglist, David Sewell (a.k.a. 3D) understands the process all too well. Sewell, Shum's partner at Forte Recordings, not only supports himself by his music, but as the father of two kids, has to tend to the family as well. Working a full-time job at Motorola, producing tracks during the wee hours of the night, and devoting weekends to playing at raves across the country, has left this breakbeat scientist with little breathing room. But by 1998, he was able to quit his job and support his family through his career goal alone. "Now I've learned to keep the money rolling in with little effort," admits Sewell, 26, who has landed deals with more than 18 labels. He and Garcia have been busy working on tracks for Canvas, a new d'n'b label put out by Bad Boy Bill, a well-known Chicago house DJ who has also re-mixed songs for Janet Jackson.

"What does this mean when a big house DJ like Bad Boy Bill is now backing up jungle music?" asks Garcia. "Obvious something big."

Brian Sarpalius, 25, is Chicago's revered Phantom 45. One of the most sought after stateside jungle DJs, Sarpalius began his career by spinning house in the late '80s, but as breakbeat began to evolve, he evolved right along with it. Having seen the rise in popularity of the house scene through its progression, he sees the exact thing happening to jungle. "I think it definitely is moving in the same direction as house music," says the Phantom. "In the next year or two it's going to level off and be more accepted."

Full Speed Ahead

Still when it comes to jungle, there seems to be a gap wider than any body of water separating the UK from the U.S.A. The general consensus by d'n'b partisans is that America will never compare with the UK in their quality of production and quantity of supporters. It seem only the inhabitants of the country where a particular music is developed can properly capture that sound. For the English, jungle is as much a reflection of their urban dance subculture as hip-hop is America's.

"You've got to give people room to learn," said UK's d'n'b don Grooverider, in the August/September issue of Mixer magazine. "Two years ago, nothing was happening in America ... Now it's taking off and who knows where it'll be two years from now. You also have to give the music time to grow, because it's in a young phase, really. It really hasn't found its real structure yet, but given time it will."

"Compared to other kinds of music, d'n'b is still in its embryonic stage," says Shum. "It's only about seven years old, look at the stage rock 'n' roll was in 1962. But it's definitely bigger and more accepted than its ever been. Everyone is waiting for the next thing, just like the way the Beatles came in '64 and changed the landscape of music."

Back in Chicago, Shum is working on perfecting a new style of d'n'b. ("Let's keep it at that"). With every track he releases, the more critical he becomes. "I think I've released a bunch of crap. But it's all just a learning process," he says.

"We all improve with time and experience. Just wait."

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