Dennis White has operated in a variety of musical scenarios during the past 37 years or so — whether it’s bands such as Charm Farm and Kevin Saunderson’s Inner City or monikers like Static Revenger and, most recently, Latroit.
So what’s one more among friends and colleagues?
This week’s release of “Classics Vol. 1” on Tuesday, Aug. 25, marks the debut of Latroit House Ensemble, a new, international collective the Grammy Award-winning White, who was born in Detroit and raised in Utica, put together to rework house music favorites into live band performance arrangements. The troupe ranges from legendary jazz bassist Ron Carter, a Ferndale native who plays on its version of Kings of Tomorrow’s “Finally,” to David Schommer (aka Duke Mushroom), who’s worked with White for more than three decades.
Also part of the party are Ferndale-based mixer Dave Darlington (another longtime associate), British dance music artist Nick Clow (Pet Shop Boys, Full Intention), South African singer Nomvula Munnie and the Grammy Award-winning Soweto Gospel Choir, who White collaborated with on the acclaimed 2024 album “History of House.”
“Classics Vol. 1” is being released Aug. 25, marking the debut of Latroit House Ensemble, an international collective of the Grammy Award-winning Dennis White, who was born in Detroit and raised in Utica, put together to rework house music favorites into live band performance arrangements. (Photo courtesy of Latroit)
The Latroit House Ensemble is, in fact, an outgrowth of that latter project. “It’s about finding the music I grew up with, that I believe in, and doing it in a different way,” White, 59, said via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “When I was experimenting with (Inner City’s) ‘Good Life’ for the ‘History of House’ album, I wanted to offer something to (Saunderson). I didn’t want to just take his beats and put Zulu voices on it. So we stripped everything off it and made it into a piano ballad.
“Once I did that, I learned many of these classic house songs are powerful songs, but that gets missed because a lot of times the song is secondary to the beat function, the dance floor/DJ purpose, utility functions of these songs. You strip that down to nothing and stick some different chords around them; they are gorgeous songs.
“So then I just started exploring the house music canon in that way, getting to a cappellas and building some chords around them. What I am hoping I’m sort of shining a light not only on the originators and the original writers, but the songwriters behind the tracks.”
In that way, it’s a culmination of White’s work over a broad spectrum of music.
After graduating from the Berklee College of Music in 1988, he returned to Detroit, living in the same loft as techno pioneers Saunderson, Juan Atkins and Derrick May. White had Charm Farm going when Saunderson decided he wanted Inner City to play live shows, which led to him touring the world with that group in 1989-90. White was also one of the first artists Saunderson signed to his KMS Records label.
White subsequently adopted the Static Revenger identity, working as a producer and remixer and collaborating on hits such as “I Like That” and “Happy People.” The success was double-edged, however. “I had pop hits,” White says, “but the thing is I’m a terrible pop producer, and I’m a worse pop DJ than I am a pop producer. I completely lost any ounce of underground or dance credibility.”
Latroit — a combination of L.A. and Detroit — was a reaction to that, allowing White to return to “start from scratch” and return to that world with a somewhat clean slate.
It was a shrewd move. As Latroit, he recorded with Inner City, Le Youth and Idris Elba and remixed for Madonna, Deadmau5, Nile Rodgers and others. His treatment of Depeche Mode’s “Your Move” won a Grammy Award in 2018 for Best Remixed Recording (Non-Classical).
The eight tracks on “Classics Vol. 1” — from Barbara Tucker’s “Beautiful People” and Chocolate Puma’s “Only Love Can Save Me” through Sade’s Pearls and Cajmere’s “Brighter Days” — are the result of “a lot of experimentation,” according to White. “It took about three songs for this project to find its voice, to figure out what this really was and how to do it.” The schedule was also accelerated due to vocalist Munnie’s visa issues as she seeks asylum in the U.S. “It’s been pretty intense,” White says.
“Finally,” of course, was one of White’s favorite endeavors, and a full-circle moment in that he and album co-producer Ramin Sakurai (Supreme Beings of Leisure) studied bass, and therefore Ron Carter, at Berklee. “I’m just fascinated by (Carter). I’m obsessed with him,” White says. “I follow him on social media. He’s 89. He’s never been more vital. He’s the coolest guy in the world. We had this song, ‘Finally,’ that I thought was done, and there’s a lot of jazz in it, but there wasn’t a lot of bass in it.”
White “didn’t expect to hear back” from Carter. “It took me three hours to write that email; I was so nervous,” he says, and went into full-scale preparation mode for the session in New York. “I was just terrified,” White remembers. “But (Carter) gave us a masterful performance. The moment he played his first note, we all started crying.
“Y’know, early in an artist’s career, you have to wait to look back and identify that, ‘Yeah, that was a noteworthy thing,’ whatever was happening. At this stage of my career, though, I can spot it and know when it’s happening in real time, which makes it more special.”
White is hoping to line up more shows with the Latroit House Ensemble. He’s also eyeballing a “Vol. 2” for early 2027, which he plans to release as a physical-only product, away from the streaming services. And he envisions a long life ahead and unlimited potential for the collective.
“It’s a good project, man,” White says. “It’s a project I believe in. And there isn’t anything like it. There are some (groups) that tick the house music box in some way and do a very good job of it in their own ways, but none of them do it like this. What happens in the crowd is magical. Whatever was happening in people’s lives earlier in the day, whatever is happening tomorrow, is gone. People are in this happiness bubble, and it’s infectious.
“I don’t want to sound grandiose, but we do make the world a better place for 90 minutes at a time. The more I do that, the happier people are gonna be.”