DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn sampled the vocal on their 2013 track “ Brighter Dayz,” flipping Dajae’s coolly optimistic hook into a more contorted figure, suggesting the way hopes harden over time.
(One major exception: Cajmere’s 1992 anthem “ Percolator,” a tweaked-out descent into chants and squeals that was recently sampled on City Girls’ “Twerkulator,” could easily have come from his angstier alter ego.) Cajmere’s most upbeat moment remains 1992’s “Brighter Days,” in which Chicago singer Dajae offers a message of uplift in the simplest of terms over sprightly drums and organ stabs it’s as carefree a song as house music has ever produced. As Green Velvet, he reveled in dark-side thrills on songs like “ The Stalker,” “ Answering Machine,” and “ La La Land” as Cajmere, he explored sweeter, more wholesome vibes. –Philip SherburneĬajual / Emotive Cajmere: “Brighter Days” (1992)Ĭurtis Alan Jones brought a Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy to Chicago house music. But it’s that soaring vocal refrain-“It’s a lovely day/And the sun is shining”-that makes it the most guilelessly optimistic day-brightener in the deep-house canon. Remixes proliferated, with Carl Craig, Roman Flügel, Isolée, Kompakt’s Michael Mayer and Tobias Thomas, and many others distilling the song into increasingly high-proof doses of minimalism. That intensity of focus resonated far outside the tri-state area’s soulful-house scene: In 1997, house innovators Derrick Carter and Luke Solomon released the track on their Classic label in the UK, and the following year Germany’s Playhouse got in on the action. But what chords! Filtered this way and that, morphing between strings, Rhodes, and synths, they move like mercury and glisten like opal Steve Reich himself couldn’t have envisioned a more enveloping matrix of pulses. Compared to the harmonic range of most of their soul-, jazz-, and gospel-tinged productions-their 1990 debut LP, in fact, came out on Motown-the 1996 single employs little more than a fistful of chords arrayed around a driving house groove. “Lovelee Dae” is an outlier in New Jersey duo Blaze’s catalog.
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