Logg

LeRoy Burgess operated under numerous aliases throughout his extensive recording career, and one of the shortest-lived was Logg, a project whose handful of post-disco tracks directly shaped the emerging house sound and cemented the musician’s status as an unwitting catalyst for the genre. Already established as an underground dance figure through earlier stints with Black Ivory and steady session work, Burgess found himself at a turning point right after Convertion’s early-1981 single “Let’s Do It” appeared. He and the rest of that lineup—producer Greg Carmichael, bassist James Calloway, drummers Sonny T. Davenport and Trevor Gale, guitarist Sonny DeGraffenreid, keyboardist Fred McFarlane, percussionist Willis Long, and backing vocalists Renee J.J. Burgess and Dorothy Terrell—hoped to continue as a stable unit. Sam Weiss, however, the owner of the SAM label that had issued “Let’s Do It,” retained the copyright to the group’s name and talks over future releases reached a deadlock. The musicians therefore signed with Salsoul, where Carmichael rechristened them Logg; within days they cut the luminous single “I Know You Will,” Larry Levan supplied the definitive mix, and the record reached stores a mere two weeks after it was tracked. Strong club reaction led the ensemble to lay down enough material for a full-length release, which Salsoul issued as the self-titled Logg LP before the close of 1981. In the end, nearly every one of the album’s six tracks enjoyed prolonged dance-floor play. Although Logg disbanded once the record was out, Burgess sustained an active career well into the early 2000s.