Jesse Saunders
Jesse Saunders is widely credited as the "Originator" of house music: his 1984 single "On & On," pieced together on a Roland TR-808 from interpolations of a handful of disco records, is commonly cited as the first house record pressed to vinyl. A fixture of Chicago's early-80s club scene as owner of the Playground nightclub, Saunders's DIY drum-machine collage gave the genre both its name and its first commercial blueprint.
The rolling bassline of "On & On" is lifted from Player One's novelty disco single "Space Invaders," one of several tracks Saunders and Vince Lawrence spliced together on a drum machine to recreate a stolen bootleg megamix — inventing house music's founding record almost by accident.
listen forThat descending, arcade-game bassline is unmistakable once you know it's there — it's the rhythmic hook "On & On" loops for its entire run.
Saunders built "On & On" partly from an interpolation of Donna Summer's "Bad Girls," folding disco's biggest crossover star into the DIY drum-machine collage that became the first commercially released house record.
listen forListen for the same driving, four-on-the-floor disco pulse underneath Summer's original — Saunders keeps that steady club rhythm intact even as he strips away the strings and horns.
The third piece of the "On & On" collage came from a track by Munich Machine, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte's Eurodisco production outfit, whose electronic, sequencer-driven groove was already pointing toward the machine-made sound Saunders pushed all the way into house.
listen forThe synthetic, motorik groove of Moroder's Munich Machine productions — all sequencer and drum machine, no live band — is the same electronic-over-organic tradeoff Saunders leans into on his own early records.