House music finds a home

Jesse Saunders is here to set the record straight, and as he traces the genealogy of house music on a recent Wednesday afternoon, he speaks with the fiery air of a parent whose offspring has become an orphan.

“Everybody and their mother and father said, ‘I did it, I started it, I made this,’ ” Saunders says of house’s now-muddy lineage. “That’s what really motivated me to say, ‘You know what, there’s too many stories, and most of the people talking about it don’t even have a clue, because they weren’t even around when it happened.’ “

But Saunders was.

A native of Chicago, where house was first popularized, Saunders is credited for producing and releasing the first house single, “On and On,” on his own Jes Say Records label.

The seeds for the now-widespread dance music genre were sown at Chicago’s legendary Warehouse nightspot, where an underage Saunders first visited when he was 16.

There, house began as an even more buoyant strain of disco.

“The disco that everyone else knew was more poppy, it was ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ the Bee Gees, stuff like that,” Saunders recalls, reclining on a couch inside the Triq ultralounge. “But the stuff that was being played at the Warehouse, in the underground, was very, very uplifting, very, very groovy. It was sped-up R&B more than it was disco. There was a different subculture there, and that’s really what spawned what we know as house music today.”

Now residing in Las Vegas, Saunders has taken it upon himself to trace the origins of house with both a book coming out this summer and a visual and musical display that debuted at Triq. The show uses documentary footage projected on a pair of video screens to detail the history of house and where the music sprang from.

Saunders’ presentation premiered as part of the recently launched “House Heaven” Saturday night weekly program at Triq, which, along with “Backstage” on Fridays, mark a new entry into the after-hours market.

The series actually takes place above Triq in the voluminous Steve Wyrick Theatre in the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood. The front of the stage is curtained off, and patrons enter an enclosed space whose back wall is another 60-foot LED curtain.

It creates an intimate, enshrouded atmosphere that lends itself to elaborate productions such as Saunders’, as well as more traditional DJ sets. If Saunders is documenting house music’s past, the folks at Triq are out to be part of its future.

“Everybody wants to be a part of something special, something unique,” says Triq general manager Gerald Pacheco. “Like when you go to a rock concert, everybody wants to get backstage and see something that other people can’t really see. We’re kind of bringing that here.”

Jason Bracelin’s “Sounding Off” column appears on Tuesdays. Contact him at 383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com.