gillespiesoul

I am a rooted, Black Conscious, African man, one that has endeared myself to those indigenous knowledge systems and traditional value applications that I have come to understand and which inform my background. Really, I am a scholar, a practitioner, of the Frantz Fanon and Stephen Biko school of thought.From the age of 14, I have always known that in the vast and varied music (entertainment) industry, there was a place for me to exert myself. The first step was to build upon my love for good music, usually the type that was less mainstream in nature. This culminated in a lot of experiential listening of many genres, from serious Jazz, through Dancehall to House music. Slowly yet emphatically, and helped with the honest realisation that I was "not a natural artist" where singing or composing music was concerned, my interest the DJ culture grew even larger.At the age of 21, a fortunate coincidence occurred when I made friends with some Rastafarians from Britain, who helped set me up with a descent collection of rare Dancehall, Dub and Roots Reggae records, CDs and tapes, which swelled my own collection of different genres. At around this time, I went to House Afrika and bought my first ever Soulful House set, comprising of 20 records, some of which I keep to this day and they still sound fresh whenever I play them! This was the beginning of the creation of gillespie (aka dizzy-gillespie), the tunesmith.It was during my residency at the now defunct Tandoor that I differentiated myself by playing sets that always inclined on SOUL, whether it was Dancehall, Hiphop, or what came to establish itself as my ultimate dance genre of focus, House Music. The soul is where the inspiration always comes from and you know it when you have experienced a set segued by gillespie, with a habitual emphasis on track selection, sequence and on-point mixes!After taking a sabbatical from the DJ scene, during which time I worked on nurturing the abilities of other DJs (most notably the emphatic DJ Dizzy D, the current Wheelpeople National DJ Champion) as well as pursue a profesional career as a Business Analyst, I have returned (forever!) to the scene in my quest to pursue my dreams, as well as to guide others to realise theirs without the fuss, the politics and the exploitation of the industry.The big dream is to establish a record label where DJs will have a home to create their music and imprint their ability on the dance music scene, and where soulful vocalists will exploit their talents with the knowledge that for as long as there exists a dance scene in the music industry, their music will be timeless! This dream is premised on the outlook that South Africa as a musical country must attain the status of being at the forefront of all the music forms that we are now proving to be gluttonous consumers of. It must come to pass that we tap into the legacies that our forebears in the music industry have worked hard to build, worldwide often with litte or no recognition.