Chicago, IL · tech-house · acid house

Green Velvet

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Chicago house royalty with a green-haired alter ego and a catalogue of acid-house hooks that never stopped filling floors — 'La La Land' still detonates.

Curtis Alan Jones, born in Chicago in 1968, grew up on blues, jazz and funk before house music caught him through the radio in the mid-1980s. He studied chemical engineering at the University of Illinois, then moved back to Chicago in 1991 and started making tracks on cheap gear under the Cajmere name.

As Cajmere he founded Cajual Records in 1992 and scored with "Brighter Days" and "Coffee Pot (It's Time for the Percolator)," the latter later named among the best Chicago house records ever made. A year later he launched a second label, Relief Records, as an outlet for the city's rawer, acid-tinged sound.

The Green Velvet alias arrived with "Flash" in 1995, a Billboard Dance Club number one, followed by "Answering Machine" and "La La Land," all built on deadpan spoken vocals and squelching 303 lines. Albums followed too, including Constant Chaos, Whatever, Walk in Love and Unshakable, with the green-haired persona's taste for the absurd intact throughout.

He has kept collaborating widely, forming the side project Get Real with Claude VonStroke in 2014 and releasing the album Unity with Carl Craig in 2015. DJ Mag has called him a stalwart of both house and techno, a description backed up by three decades spent working club and festival bills alike.

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