Frankie Knuckles' music spins on | Evening Digest | hpherald.com – Hyde Park Herald

Frankie Knuckles’ record collection, archived and on display at the Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Is Ave., March 30, 2024.

Staff writer
Frankie Knuckles’ record collection, archived and on display at the Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Is Ave., March 30, 2024.
Nearly a decade after the death of Frankie Knuckles, the Chicago DJ heralded by many as the “godfather of house music,” his close friend Frederick “Freddie” Dunson carefully removed one of Knuckles’ favorite records from a plastic sleeve and placed it on a turntable. 
“I was a DJ for a short time in high school,” Dunson proclaimed to a small crowd gathered at the Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave., last Friday, as he reached for the needle. 
But after Dunson’s first and second attempts to get the needle on the record failed, Theaster Gates, creator of the Arts Bank and founder of the Rebuild Foundation, stepped in to lend a helping hand. 
“I didn’t say I was really proficient,” Dunson joked as Gates assisted him. 
While the crowd grooved to Knuckles’ remix of Whitney Houston’s 1978 “I’m Every Woman” thumping through the speakers, a small box next to the turntable recorded the music, completing the eight-year digitization process of Knuckles’ collection of almost 5,000 vinyls.  
According to Leo Guzman, a born-and-raised Chicago DJ who helped archive nearly 200 of those vinyls, when Knuckles first played the remix during a set, he repeated the three-minute track for 30 minutes straight. 
Dunson, president of the Frankie Knuckles Foundation (FKF), entrusted Gates’ Rebuild Foundation with storing, archiving and digitizing the collection after Knuckles’ death in 2014. Throughout the March 30 show, he had nothing but praise for the acclaimed conceptual artist.
“This man and Rebuild has given him a whole ‘nother life,” Dunson said. 
The Arts Bank is one of several South Side properties Gates’ Rebuild Foundation has restored and reopened since its founding in 2010. In addition to holding Knuckles’ vinyl collection, the bank building and gallery space also holds an extensive archive from the Johnson H. Johnson Publishing Company, and features blow-up images from Ebony magazine and original works by Gates in its main gallery. 
“Ten years (later) and people are still talking about (Knuckles) as if it’s 1977 and 1978 and he just moved to Chicago and started playing everywhere,” Dunson said of Knuckles’ popularity today.
Knuckles, who was born Francis Warren Nicholls Jr. in the Bronx, left New York for the second city in the late 1970s to take a gig as resident DJ at the Warehouse, a factory turned nightclub on South Jefferson Street near Greektown. Along with South Sider Jesse Saunders, Knuckles is widely credited as one of the originators of house music.
Gates was proud to see this project come to fruition after countless hours of labor by more than a half dozen paid and volunteer archivists, many of whom were in attendance.
“All of this universal generosity, universal care, Black love, Black joy, it’s unfortunately too rare,” he said. “The entire house music community has helped us do this thing … and we ended up having the hottest house party cult in this country because of your generosity.”
Mario Williams, one of the archivists who worked on the digitization project, said they started by tagging each record in the Knuckles collection with a number and creating associated metadata that they logged in a spreadsheet. 
He and the other archivists, Gates included, then made scans of the inner sleeves and the records themselves before spending hours alone in the studio listening to the record and recording it in real time using the free audio editor Audacity. 
“You can’t speed it up,” Gates noted. “If it skips, you got to make a decision: do I restart at the beginning of the album, do I restart this track?”
Williams, who is a DJ and the host of a hip-hop show at Hyde Park’s WHPK radio station, said he kept a running playlist of all the tracks and artists he found while digitizing the records. 
“I discovered so much,” he said.
Gates said Dunson invited him to see the prolific DJ’s extensive record collection shortly after Knuckles died in 2014 at the young age 59 due to complications associated with his Type 2 diabetes. Although Knuckles also had large collections of sportswear and hats, Gates thought he could give new life to the records and so he helped Dunson kickstart FKF and secured funding from the Mellon Foundation for the digitization project.
Now that the records are digitized, house music DJs Duane Powell and Celeste Alexander will use them to develop their own sets, according to Ellen Alderman, director of programs and operations at Rebuild Foundation.
“It’s not enough to have them on the wall,” she said. “We have to use them.”
Alderman said Knuckles’ vinyl will also be featured as part educational programs about the origins and legacy of house music and when the Arts Bank restarts its “Sunday Service” dance parties this spring.
“As Theaster would say, ‘We have to jack,’” Alderman said.
Staff writer
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Sunshine and clouds mixed. High 79F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph..
Partly cloudy this evening, then becoming cloudy after midnight. Low near 55F. Winds NNE at 10 to 20 mph.
Updated: June 9, 2024 @ 1:53 pm
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