Liquid Room

More than a mere DJ, Gilles Peterson is an arbiter of taste and style. The Englishman who launched the acid jazz movement, Peterson will visit Japan to help local hipsters, DJ unit UFO celebrate their 10th anniversary in a Worldwide Tour that will touchdown at Liquid Room for an all-nighter on Tuesday, January 23.

Sometimes termed the British equivalent of Motown' Berry Gordy for his impact on the direction of music history, Peterson was raised in South London by French/Swiss parents. Setting up his own pirate radio station in the early '80s, Peterson says on his website that he got his first club gig through sheer persistence. "I was going into the (record) shop, making a nuisance of myself and being irritating," he says. "It was by being an irritant that I got myself a gig."

Based on his musical tastes that ran from jazz and funk to soul and hip-hop, Peterson founded the Acid Jazz label with some colleagues in the mid-'80s. While the name was intended as a joke, it soon became the keyword for the urban, funk-influenced jazz that spread around the world as a sound and fashion. Peterson recounted the time in a 1996 interview with the Camden Lock:

"People didn't really understand the truth of what acid jazz was. Suddenly acid jazz became mods listening to old Jimmy Smith records. For me it was always about mixing mad acid house with jazz and doing acid in little rooms in warehouse parties."

Acid Jazz became home to some of the most important artists of the '90s, including the Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai, Mother Earth and Courtney Pine. The sound also came to exert an enormous influence in Japan on the budding Shibuya sound, as reflected in UFO and singers like Monday Michiru.

Peterson also began to raise his profile as an artist/producer by releasing the Jazz Juice compilations for key US labels such as Blue Note and Prestige, and by DJing for BBC Radio London. (Currently he can be heard weekly on BBC Radio One.)

Not content to rest on his acid jazz laurels, Peterson went on in the '90s to found the Talkin Loud label as a venue for ongoing innovations in dance music, logical extensions of the acid jazz movement. The label became home to artists as diverse as drum 'n' bass innovator Roni Size and house unit Masters At Work (the duo of "Little" Louie Vega and Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez), who scored a huge 1997 hit with their album NuYorican Soul.

Peterson's most recent album is the INCredible Sound of Gilles Peterson, hailed by London Time Out as, "A funky, jazzy, Latin-flavored extremely groovy thing.".

Worldwide Tour: Liquid Room, 1/23, 9pm, JY3000 (adv), JY3500 (door). Tel: 03-3200-6831. www.liquidroom.net See listings for details.