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The story of this label is the story of a scene weve never fully appreciated our position before but hearing these tracks together is so evocative of a time when everything changed, says Acid Jazz boss Eddie Piller.

The club and radio DJ (6Music, The Modcast), and Essex-born geezer, is gruffly mulling over the previous nights party a private bash for his labels silver anniversary and the 25 years before that. Its a ripe old age to have reached in the fickle music industry. Piller and label cohort (and savvy compiler) Dean Rudland have sealed Acid Jazzs flavours into a rich multi-disc box set spanning its classic funk and soul roots, its crossover hits from dapper signings such as The Brand New Heavies, The James Taylor Quartet, A Man Called Adam and Jamiroquai, its party shakers and remixes. Its not a conventional history lesson, more a snapshot of a pivotal point when British club culture morphed, embraced new forms and had far-reaching effects.

Acid jazz was also an offshoot of the rave scene around 1986/1987, as seasoned mod and jazz fan Piller, label co-founder Gilles Peterson and their fellow DJs began to discover Ibizas acid house sound.

Within six months of acid hysteria in London, I was getting bored with the music, admits Piller. We loved the clubs atmosphere but wanted to bring things back to the spark of the black music we loved.

This was a youth culture based accidentally on eclecticism, where youd hear a jazz track next to a Public Enemy record or a funky Led Zeppelin track. Gilles said, for a laugh: Why dont we call it acid jazz? It allowed us to start from year zero.

Acid jazz had a breadth of tastes, agrees Dean Rudland, who joined the labels team in the early 1990s (Peterson left to launch influential friendly rival label Talkin Loud in 1990). It was just a decade after punk but we went from soul and psych-rock to reggae and dance of all styles.

Around the turn of the 1990s, acid jazz really became a mainstream contender; Piller recalls DJing at intimate Sunday jazz dances (you couldnt even get a beer after 2pm but the atmosphere was stunning), while Rudland describes his shock at looking over The Brand New Heavies sold-out Brixton Academy show in 1992. The label nodded to transatlantic sounds and established fanbases across Europe and the Far East, yet it remained distinctly British in tone.

Thats what the British are best at: were cultural magpies, mixing other music and making it better for us, says Piller. Acid jazz was the latest conduit of that international outlook. It was a music thing that evolved into a fashion thing. It was also self-fulfilling; we started off listening to black music, young white kids such as Jamiroquai played their takes on it with a modern twist and that impacted around the world.

That youth culture also came with a hippyish ethos; Acid Jazz signings from Galliano and Mother Earth to Jamiroquai served dance grooves with a right-on stance. There was a big belief in 1970s right-on political theories, says Rudland. The scene had grown out of a left-wing clubbing movement. People would leave Sohos Wag Club on a Sunday night then join the protests outside the South African Embassy on the way to their night bus.

Admittedly, becoming an established trend posed its own challenges, as Piller points out. When some of our bands blew up internationally, suddenly everything was called acid jazz, he says.

Read more here:
Acid jazz turns 25: The story of a scene