Jay Zimmermann

Long before there was a label, a radio show in Tokyo or a passport full of booth stamps, Jay Zimmermann was the guy in a ski town who couldn't leave a party alone. He grew up in Japan, living there until he was 14, when he moved to San Diego. He is also a skilled jazz saxophone player, and after graduating from high school he played in a funky rock fusion band. By 1991, in Sun Valley, Idaho, he was throwing underground mashup house parties for the tourist crowds that rolled through the resort, stitching records together for people who had come for the slopes and stayed for the music. One of the people he met there was a young Dan Hruby. Jay taught him the basics of DJing, how to line one record up against another and keep a room moving, and in doing so set off the chain of events that became Red Melon Records. It is a fitting origin for a DJ whose reputation has always rested, above all, on reading the people in front of him.

Dano founded Red Melon in San Francisco in 1996. About a year later Jay joined him, moving to the city to throw himself into its house scene and becoming part of the label. On flyers he was usually JZ. A consummate connector, he introduced Dano to Fred Zirdung (Fredness) in 1999, and Fred became Red Melon's third member. In the years that followed he became one of the label's best-known faces in the booth, carrying its sound from San Francisco's clubs to dancefloors around the world.

What defines him behind the decks is an ability to play for the crowd. He has built his reputation on hard-hitting peak-time sets as much as slow-burning warm-ups, and the music he moves through runs from deep house and funky tech house out to funk and disco. He weaves together varied but always funky styles, and his own taste shines through in sets built to please a crowd. That is a particular kind of DJ, less interested in proving a point than in finding the groove a room is already leaning toward and pushing it further.

In San Francisco that instinct found a home in some of the city's key rooms. He held residencies at Spundae at 1015 Folsom and at DNA Lounge, the Melon party at the Winter Music Conference in Miami, and Melon:LAX, which he ran every other month at Spundae/Circus in Los Angeles, carrying the label's night down the coast. He also played the Watermelon boat parties out on San Francisco Bay. Some of those nights survive. A recording of Red Melon presents at DNA Lounge on July 21, 2001, has Jay taking the decks after Fredness and before Dano and Chris Udoh. Another recording, from Melon at DNA Lounge on November 2, 2002, puts him alongside Dano, Fredness and Jon Terry, and he has shared his own sets from that night and from Burning Man on his SoundCloud.

The Red Melon story was always a story about friends, and Jay's travels with Dano are part of it. The two toured together to Wellington, Singapore and Bali, taking the label's sound to the far side of the Pacific. The cities Jay has played read like a map of where house music lives: Wellington, Tokyo, Mexico City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Encinitas and Porto, Burning Man out on the playa, and back home to Boise and Sun Valley, where it all began. There have also been nights at Zouk in Singapore, Opera Bay in Buenos Aires and Release in San Francisco, along with dates in Brazil, France, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Hong Kong and Spain.

Japan, where he grew up, eventually became home again, and he has played there since 2009. Tokyo and the wider Kanto region are where he has played most, and WOMB, Origami, Jicoo The Floating Bar, VENT and BPM Music Bar are among his most frequent rooms, along with ageHa, AIR, Vision, Eleven and Nagisa Festival. For several years he also hosted his own monthly show, DEEP&TECH, on block.fm, the Tokyo dance-music radio station. The episodes, which ran from the early 2010s to the middle of the decade, captured the sound: deep house and tech house that was rolling, warm and groove-first, mixed with a musician's patience. The show also spilled off the airwaves. DEEP&TECH presented FLOAT, a series of boat parties aboard Jicoo The Floating Bar on Tokyo Bay, with Jay as resident. That was a fitting echo of the Watermelon cruises on San Francisco Bay years earlier.

Today Jay lives in Hayama, a seaside town in Kanagawa, south of Tokyo, and still plays the city's clubs. Recent bills have placed him in Tokyo with Doc Martin at THE HOUSE TOKYO, alongside DJ Nori at LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, and with Mixmaster Morris, Christopher Willits and Hideo Kobayashi at umi conexión's "Hayamatic!" in 2025. That last event reflects how far the West Coast connection has travelled with him. He is also building new nights of his own, among them APNEA, where he has shared the decks with Shinsuke Goto, Moodman, KOTSU and Kasumisty.

It is tempting to call Jay a Red Melon elder statesman, but that misses the spirit of the thing. He is the friend who handed over the basics in a mountain town and then spent more than three decades proving those basics could carry a room anywhere: from a boat on San Francisco Bay to a desert in Nevada, from a club in Tokyo to a beach town on the Kanagawa coast. The records came out under the label's name. Jay was out there playing them, and playing everything around them, to people who had never heard of Red Melon and left as fans.