In anticipation of SELECTIONS NO. 3 with JADALAREIGN, writer Ella Ray spoke with the DJ, event curator, and educator about the bridge between dance music and liberation, the importance of Black queer femme mentorship, and what we can expect from her session on September 27th at MONO SPACE.
Ella Ray
Your approach to playing dance music is expansive, capturing the sprawling roots of the genre and exemplifying your sonic dexterity. Where and how does your journey with dance music begin?
JADALAREIGN
I grew up in a musical household. My mom has a very eclectic music taste—soul, funk, disco, Brazilian music, jazz, rock—so I had this as my foundation for music appreciation. While I was working on the hip-hop side of the music industry in college, I was going to a lot of parties and that's where I cultivated my ear for dance music.
My first experience with underground dance music, and its origins in Black and brown queer communities, was when I was around twenty-one. One of the first parties that I attended before I became a DJ was a party that Natasha Diggs was playing. The thing about the party that she was DJing was, it was centered around the dancer instead of bottle service. I was really intrigued by the atmosphere of this party, the music that was being played, and the energy in the room. It was just highly kinetic, and it had a completely different feel to it.
That was the impetus for me to lean more into that side of nightlife. And I was fortunate to experience the last years of iconic clubs in New York like Cielo, Output, and other formative clubs before they closed. That is the era when I cultivated my interest in dance music, but more specifically, house music. And I started DJing shortly after that in 2015.
Photograph by Foster K. White
I really like how you mentioned the intergenerational aspect of nightlife. Could you speak more about those community connections?
Having worked in the industry since the blogging era, I got to meet a lot of people who were really instrumental in different parts of dance music culture. And Natasha, as I mentioned, was one of the first people who really inspired me with her DJing. She was very quick to embrace me and my peers—asking us to play her party Soul in the Horn early on. People like Natasha are the reason why dance music culture is so popular amongst this newer generation because it's kind of been like a passing of the torch in terms of the knowledge and access to the platform. I think that kind of embrace is really important in terms of preserving any kind of culture.
When I started, women and femmes were DJing, but it was a lot less common. Folks like Natasha inspired a lot of the work that I did with my educational initiatives to pay that sentiment forward.
Educational access and mentorship are prioritized in all the community projects you’ve built and participated in. How does your role as a music educator intersect with your DJ practice?
I felt it was really important to create this space for femmes, non-binary, and queer people to learn about music. But also, building a sense of community is equally important to me, because I felt like, despite there being a handful of women in the game at the time when I came in, it didn't seem to have a strong sense of community that was centered around non-men. And it was important for me to enlist teachers who weren't necessarily formal educators, but had built their own musical practice and wanted to empower others to do the same. There are several DJs or producers that I met through these workshops who are doing wonderful things. Goes to show how necessary it actually was and still is.
Absolutely. It sets a precedent for how we can care for each other beyond the basics. Plus, a curious educational space is so powerful. And at its core, Black American house is liberation music.
Recently, you’ve DJ’ed to raise money to support the campaign to close Riker’s Island and to gather mutual aid funds for Congo, among many other efforts of community care over the years. Talk to me about how you’re using your platform as a DJ.
For me, it's all rooted in a sentiment of liberation and understanding that nobody can be liberated unless the most vulnerable members of the community are liberated. Mutual aid is an easy thing to do, after making sure everyone is paid. I think my approach to curating events, much like my approach to music, is rooted in a desire for liberation. Music has been an aid throughout my life, getting me through difficult times and making me feel empowered. It's a tool to uplift. And the gift that it's been to me is something that I want to share with other people when I'm playing. Liberation is what I am thinking about when I'm selecting records or putting a mix together. I want people to feel good. I want people to feel and be liberated.
Collective listening is its own form of knowledge production and community education, its own kind of getting free. What’s your approach to something like this listening session?
This night at MONO SPACE is a unique opportunity for me because it's a completely different context than what I typically play in, which is a nightclub with a dance floor. And I'm really grateful for this more intentional way of interacting with music. For example, [vinyl] records are higher quality audio and we can hear different elements of a song with more accuracy. In this kind of environment, you're actually getting the full experience of the music, actively listening. Whereas, in a nightclub setting, you're either talking to a friend or having a drink, or dancing. There are all of these different distractions.
Yes, I'm a DJ, but I'm a deep lover of music. I think being a good DJ requires you to be fluent in the language of music. I'm also a digger, so I love going out and finding records that maybe I'm not playing in my sets. But I really enjoy studying music, listening to different kinds of music, and getting more historical context for the music that I'm playing—what preceded it, what it was inspired by. Especially music from different regions in the United States or different parts of the world. These are all things that I'm actively familiarizing myself with to better inform my practice as a DJ.
For this session, I'm going to dig a little bit deeper into some of my favorite records, predominantly from the '70s, a few from the '80s, and some contemporary. The records I plan on playing marry all of the influences and concepts we’ve been speaking about: liberation, education, and uplifting. I’m putting together a selection of spiritual jazz, spoken word, and jazz fusion. That will give people a snapshot of the kind of music that really inspires me off the dance floor, which in turn informs my practice on the dance floor, if that makes sense.
That makes total sense and sounds very generous.
Being a DJ is great, and commanding a dance floor is really powerful. But I think the essence of being a DJ is having a greater comprehension of, like I said, the language of music. And that takes a lot of deep listening. These will be selections from my personal collection and very different from what I typically play on the dance floor.
Pictured: JADALAREIGN in performance for Honey’s Dijon’s Stamina takeover at Knockdown Center, New York City, June 02, 2024. Photograph by Bryan Kwon.
Lastly, who are you speaking to when you play music? What story do you hope to convey?
That's a good question. I think I speak to music lovers. I hope to communicate with any person who is committed to getting free in this lifetime, whatever that means to them individually. Anyone on a journey of ascension, of healing, of growing, of becoming a more optimized version of themself. People who want to make the world a better place than they found it, because that's kind of the journey that I'm on.
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