Byron Stingily is one of the greatest singers ever to emerge out of the Chicago house scene and also one of the most congenial. He also stands 6 feet 3 inches tall, weighs more than 200 pounds and will admit to having less than charitable thoughts about a domestic music industry that still remains mostly clueless when it comes to dance music.
Consider that Stingily is in the midst of a tour that will take him to outdoor festivals, concert halls and clubs throughout Europe and Japan. He’s booked overseas into July. But as for Chicago appearances, let alone concerts anywhere in North America, Stingily says he’s got nothing booked at the moment.
“You bet I find that ironic,” says the singer, reached by phone in France. “You could say I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about things like that. When you do something as long as I have, you want to be successful and acknowledged. But for some reason that has always been a struggle” in America.
Stingily is among countless Chicago house artists who have found commercial success overseas while attracting little notice at home. His hits, including “Devotion” and “That’s the Way Love Is,” both with the group Ten City, and “Get Up,” a 1996 solo effort, are considered standards in European dance clubs. “Get Up,” for example, has sold more than 300,000 copies internationally. But Stingily’s hits remain largely of the underground variety in the States.
With the release of his first solo album, “The Purist” (Nervous), Stingily once again seeks to punch through to the mainstream. The disc showcases Stingily’s mighty tenor voice, with its piercing cries and feathery falsetto trills, in a variety of sumptuous house settings crafted by a who’s who of club producers, including Frankie Knuckles, Maurice Joshua, David Morales and Louie Vega. Its centerpiece is a spine-tingling cover of Sylvester’s disco classic, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” which already has ascended to No. 1 on the domestic club chart.
More impressive is how “You Make Me Feel” is integrated into the album, part of a coherent collection of songs that uses the dusk-till-dawn musical ebb-and-flow of a house club as the backdrop for a night of emotional turmoil: optimism, anticipation, nostalgia, yearning, ecstasy, temptation and, finally, spiritual transformation.
“House is primarily a producer’s medium, in part because most people who sing on house records are studio singers who don’t have an understanding or a passion for the music,” Stingily says. “They have a hit or two and move on to another genre. But I grew up in clubs like the Warehouse, the Playground, even Medusa’s, and I developed a love of dance music.”
At the same time, Stingily was absorbing soul, funk and even rock. “House is uptempo R&B, it’s pop, it’s gospel — it’s built on so many different types of music,” he says. “To me, it’s a beat and a feeling, and in the clubs in Chicago back in the day you could hear anything from Chaka Khan to Depeche Mode and the B-52’s. It all qualified as house. That definition has narrowed down considerably since then. But now I hear a hip-hop record with a Diana Ross sample running underneath it or that new Prodigy record and I go, `Wow! That’s still house to me.’ “
What binds all these records together as club music, the singer says, is the mood. “It’s about escaping, releasing, letting go,” he says. “House is about getting into a space where you’re not worrying about paying bills or that boyfriend or girlfriend who left you that day. It’s about getting into a happier space for a few hours.”
With “The Purist,” Stingily offers a brief autobiography in the liner notes, complete with snapshots from his youth. The disc’s tone is autobiographical, as well, with Stingily’slyrics striking an unusually introspective stance, especially by dance-music standards. These efforts reflect Stingily’s desire to transform dance music from an essentially faceless art form to one with bonafide personalities.
“Disco was considered faceless for a long time, and then artists with strong personalities began to emerge — like Donna Summer, even the Village People,” he says. “Hip-hop was struggling for mainstream recognition until people like Run-D.M.C. came along with personality and stage presence. The same thing needs to happen in house.”
To promote up-and-coming artists, Stingily is starting his own Chicago label with producer Mike Dunn. It will be called Deep Soul, with distribution by the New York-based Nervous. Stingily knows there’s an untapped market in America hungering for what he has to offer.
“I did a brief tour of the U.S. last year and 1,200 people would show up to see me perform in places like St. Louis, Denver and Phoenix, where I’d never been before,” he says. “House seems to get a pop hit every 12 to 18 months, but to really break through it needs to have a few hits all at once. I’d like to put together a tour to take it to the mainstream, something that shows the culture of the music with deejays and artists having a big house party. Call it `House Fest’ or `Club Jam’ or something like that.”
The domestic record industry has show signs of slowly waking to house’s massive international stature. This year it awarded its first dance-music Grammy Award, to house producer, mixer and deejay Frankie Knuckles.
“It was long overdue, but it was good to see that finally we’re receiving some acknowledgment,” Stingily says. “If you look at the history of dance music, it’s really a youth-driven art form that has been going on for decades. Early rock ‘n’ roll was dance music. Be-bop was once considered dance music. Now I’d like to think it’s our turn.”
