Tony Humphries

Tony Humphries ranks among the rare disc jockeys whose presence at the center of New York dance culture extended across the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, marking him as a pivotal figure in house music’s development. His contributions to garage—sometimes called the Jersey Sound after his long residency at Newark’s Club Zanzibar—stand out as especially consequential. While Larry Levan’s sets at Paradise Garage supplied the style’s name, Humphries sustained and expanded the sound through the 1980s and 1990s, matching Levan in his capacity to lift dancers toward ever-greater states of euphoria on the floor.

Born in Brooklyn in 1957, Humphries started amassing records at ten and later joined a DJ collective during his college years in Manhattan. A music-industry path had never occurred to him until a strike idled his editorial post at New York’s Daily News in the early 1980s; from that point he never returned. He took a job in a record shop and began broadcasting on New York’s 98.7 KISS-FM in 1981. The following year he launched a residency at Club Zanzibar across the river in Newark, New Jersey.

Although Levan’s Paradise Garage performances lent the genre its designation as the soulful New York strain of early house, Humphries proved equally decisive in exposing the music to broader listeners. Virtually every prominent East Coast producer who emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s cited him emphatically, while his selections also shaped numerous second-wave British acts. That transatlantic link proved advantageous at the decade’s turn, when Humphries joined a wave of American DJs who built reputations—and sizable incomes—on British soil. A few years afterward, London’s Ministry of Sound offered him an exclusive contract to perform and create material for its combined club-and-label operation. He also supplied remixes for Chaka Khan, Deee-Lite, the Sugarcubes, and Janet Jackson, among others. In addition to mix compilations issued on Strictly Rhythm and Tribal UK, Humphries released several original tracks under the Tony Humphries Project moniker.