Garage House

Garage house, also called US garage or the New York/New Jersey sound, is the soulful, song-based branch of early house music centred on New York's Paradise Garage and Newark's Club Zanzibar. Closer to disco and R&B than the Chicago variant, it favours gospel-inflected piano chords, organ, live-feeling basslines, drum-machine grooves and powerful, predominantly female vocals delivering full songs rather than minimal club tools. Shaped above all by DJ *Larry Levan*'s eclectic, emotive mixing, the style privileges warmth, musicianship and communal uplift, and it later fed directly into UK garage and mainstream dance-pop.