Tony Hewitt
Tony Hewitt's route to San Francisco ran through Manchester and the warehouses of Los Angeles, and you can hear all three cities in his music. He grew up in Manchester, crossed to the United States in 1988, and found his way into LA's underground warehouse parties, Doc Martin's above all, at a moment when the West Coast was inventing its own answer to the house music pouring out of Chicago, New York and the UK.
He started DJing in 1991, and in 1992 he moved north to San Francisco, which became the base for everything that followed. He was part of the wave of British transplants who helped shape San Francisco house in the '90s, alongside DJs such as Jeno, Garth and Thomas Bullock, and he was a resident at Funky Tekno Tribe and a regular at the Gathering, two of the parties that defined the city's sound in that decade. That sound, deep, infectious and grounded in groove, became his calling card, and by the late '90s the West Coast style he helped define was making its mark on dancefloors on both sides of the Atlantic.
His career is a story of long collaborations. He has worked with a run of West Coast heavyweights, Hipp-E, Halo, Onionz, Doc Martin and Terry Francis among them, releasing as Hipp-E & Tony and Onionz & Tony, and his bio describes sets and productions that combine the funk of classic house with the energy of modern club music. The 6400 Crew circle, which also took in Joeski and Onionz, was part of that network of friends and studio partners, a reminder of how collaborative the scene was.
In 2000 he founded Tango Recordings, right as the West Coast sound was breaking through nationally. Tango, now based in Oakland, remains central to his work and continues to feed the underground with the kind of house he loves, and he went on to found Nightshift Recordings and Detour Recordings as well. More recently he has been developing new projects with Denver's Hipp-E and Ben A, keeping old partnerships alive while looking forward.
What comes through in his records is restraint and swing: basslines that roll rather than pound, percussion that keeps a floor moving without shouting, and a dubby sense of space that owes something to the UK and something to Californian sunshine. It is music made by a DJ, for DJs who want to hold a room for hours.
On Red Melon he is the Tony in Dano & Tony, and their 1998 EP The Crawl is one of the label's signature early records. The title track is a pitched-down jacker, the Phazer Dub soaks its groove in phaser, and the package also includes "The Aquarian". It captures the late-'90s West Coast sound at its most playful and its most hypnotic, and it is still a record that turns up in the bags of DJs who love that era.
More than two decades on, Tony Hewitt remains one of the scene's steadiest hands, a DJ and label owner who has spent his whole career keeping the San Francisco groove alive.
