The Compleat Virtuosi

Of all the world's virtuosi, none was more certain of his art than Phonographist Joe Warfield. Maestro Warfield's instruments were three phonographs and 300 or so records--and he played them with an artist's rapt care. Warfield was a disquaire, a man who played the phonograph, and he took a witch doctor's grave delight in his work. "I create a mood like a painting," he would say I can make the people dance. I can make them sit down." Awe-struck by such commanding art, a newspaper columnist once told him: "Warfield, if only I had your power!"

Oz. Warfield's arena was the doll-house dance floor of the exclusive Princesse, one of the 50 discotheques that currently preside over Parisian night life. La Princesse is a definitive discotheque--a private-unless-we-know-you bar that is smoky, chic and expensive.

It offers its customers nothing more than hour after hour of phonograph records and a chance to dance where there is no room to breathe. Having such creatures as null Sagan, Porfirio Rubirosa and Yves Saint-Laurent under his electrified baton was excuse enough for the Pavlovian power Warfield felt, but like all pioneer artists, he was misunderstood in his time. Last week, for all his genius, he was fired on the implied charge that he was turning the Princesse into a laboratory for psy-chomusical research; he had become a power-crazed, prima donna player of the phonograph.

The remaining disquaires are generally less inspired than Warfield, but their ranks are deep and growing. France has at least 200 discotheques, and the Jet Set has spawned carbon copies in Manhattan, providing ample opportunity for great phonograph players to practice their subtle art. In control rooms off the dance floor, they preside over the music, nimbly switching from turntable to turntable to spin new records. Some discotheques allow their patrons to suggest tunes to the disquaire, but at many such an impertinence would be unthinkable--like asking Pablo Casals to play Melancholy Baby.

Then I Attack. "I play what I feel is needed," says Makim Toure, a Guinean disquaire at Paris' King Club who plays his twin turntables with all the grace and flamboyance of a 19th century concert pianist. When too many dancers take the floor in France, the compleat disquaire strikes them into their chairs by playing a French song--recurrent proof of the popular theory that Frenchmen hate their own music. To liven things up, disquaires turn to Ray Charles or a hully-gully by The Cookies.

Culling a little glory from other people's songs occasionally develops in disquaires the kind of personality that makes jerks out of disk jockeys, and the power to make people sit down or stand up is, of course, corrupting. Disquaires have the added pleasure of watching their spell take effect. Soon they start talking like Che Guevara. "I manipulate the crowd," says the woman disquaire at New Jimmy's in Paris. "I play four or five slows, then I attack with a twist."

The man who dared think up discotheques is Jean-Claude Merle, a Paris entrepreneur who opened a club called La Discotheque 14 years ago and is still riding the boom. When he began, he detested musicians ("They play for perhaps twelve minutes, then go to the bar and swill down drinks for half an hour"), but now he detests phonograph records with the cold fury that comes from marrying a machine. This week Merle will close down his discotheque for a month or two, and when he reopens, it will be with the help of a live piano player--an anachronism, perhaps, but a man with no delusions.

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