Brad Knutson

Beginning this week, local hip-hop promoter Sang Yi is launching a brand new DJ series at Lava called "Lessons." The new monthly, which will go down the second Thursday of each month, is taking a different approach to the usual club-night mentality of booking only the trendiest names or the biggest draws. "We’re showcasing DJs I feel don’t get the credit they deserve or have the opportunity to come to Chicago as much as some of the other guys," says Yi. "They’re not necessarily the current trend, but these are guys that are like lost in time." Yi is calling his new monthly series "Lessons" as an homage to Steve Stein, aka DJ Steinski, the humble New York copywriter turned hip-hop cult legend who created the groundbreaking mix-tape series of the same name back in the 1980s. And, of course, you can’t start the lesson without the teacher, so Yi is bringing in Steinski himself to kick off the series.

Unexpectedly, despite his cult-figure status, it seems Stein has become an almost regular fixture on the Chicago club circuit recently, thanks mostly to an interest and friendship struck up with Yi. "About four years ago, he [first] contacted me to do a gig at Smart Bar," says Stein. "I was really surprised because I didn’t have an agent at the time and the fact that someone would contact me out of the blue was pleasant and astonishing." These days, however, Stein does have a booking agent and he’s been getting a lot more invitations from longtime fans like Yi. However, despite his old-school pedigree, Stein has made a concerted effort not to get pigeonholed as merely a nostalgia act trying to live off of past glories. Instead, Stein went back to work in the studio to knock out some new mixes that he could pitch to promoters and promote to fans to dispel any beliefs that he’s still stuck in 1983. "I was horribly afraid that I was going to get booked as a straight-up oldies act," Stein says, "so I got a little package together including a mix that I had done live on the computer, so that people who booked me would not be working off a preconceived notion of what I would play."

Outside of Chicago and New York, Stein has actually found himself touring in Europe more than anywhere else, typically playing at least four or five dates a month in the fall and winter. "People in Europe tend to be less strict about the categorizing of the music they listen to," Stein theorizes. "I can go into clubs that are generally house clubs and play a wide variety of stuff…and they’re just as happy with that. Here [in America] I get the impression that people are like, ‘Hey, I thought you were just going to play old hip-hop?’"

Like most DJs, when you ask Stein what his sets consist of nowadays, you’ll get the typical, "a little bit of everything" response. However, Stein is a rare case when that response actually does carry some weight. Take a rabid vinyl historian from the eighties with 10,000-plus records in his personal collection and put him in the new millennium with access to just about anything in the world via the Internet, and you’ve got a DJ with a repertoire so deep that it probably should be outlawed.

"I’m usually good for several hours and can cover a lot of ground," says Stein in a rare boastful moment. "I’ve been [recently] listening to a whole lot of contemporary go-go music, I’ve liked the Baltimore stuff for quite a while…I’m revisiting a lot of the New Orleans stuff, a lot of Brazilian music, a lot of the Indian-influenced dance music that shows up in London, a lot of African stuff."

DJ Steinski spins September 13 at Lava, 1270 North Milwaukee, (773)342-5282, at 9pm.

(2007-09-11)

Also by Brad Knutson

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