Disco music : a dance style

Disco is a genre of music that originated in discothèques. Generally the term refers to a specific style of music that has influences from funk, soul music, and salsa and the Latin or Hispanic songs which influenced salsa.

Popularity of disco music

1975 was the year when disco really took off, with hit songs like Van McCoy's "The Hustle" and Donna Summer's "Love To Love You Baby" reaching the mainstream. 1975 also marked the release of the first disco mix on album, the A side of Gloria Gaynor's remake of The Jackson 5's "Never Can Say Goodbye". Disco's popularity peaked between 1976 - 1979, driven in part by films such as 1977's classic Saturday Night Fever and 1978's Thank God It's Friday. Disco also gave rise to an increased popularity of line dancing and other partly pre-choreographed dances; many line dances can be seen in films such as Saturday Night Fever, which also features the Hustle.

Internationally, the pop star Dalida was the first to make disco music in France with 1975's "J'attendrai" which was a big hit there as well as in Canada and Japan in 1976. She also released many other disco hits between 1975 and 1981, including "Monday, Tuesday... Laissez-moi danser" in 1979, translated the same year as "Let Me Dance Tonight" for the USA, where she was their "French diva" since her late-1978 performance at the Carnegie Hall. Soon after Dalida's pioneering French disco work, other French artists recorded disco: Claude François, in 1976 with his song "Cette année-là" (a cover of The Four Seasons' disco hit "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)"), then the famous "yé-yé" French pop singer Sheila, with her group B. Devotion, who even had a hit in the USA (a rarity for French artists) with the song "Spacer" in 1979.

Many other European artists also recorded disco music; in Germany, Frank Farian formed a disco band by the name Boney M around 1975. They had a string of number one hits in a few European countries which continued into the early 1980s, with songs such as "Daddy Cool", "Brown Girl in the Ring" and "By the Rivers of Babylon". Still today, the trademark sound of Boney M is seen as emblematic for late 70's German disco music.

Disco fever reached a peak in South Asia after the release of the Bollywood film Disco Dancer in 1982. It stars Mithun Chakraborty as an Indian disco champion who is out to get revenge on P. N. Oberoi (Om Shivpuri), a rich industrialist who once slapped and insulted his mother.

Japan also boasted a number of homegrown disco artists. The nation's top-selling female duo of the late 1970s, Pink Lady, incorporated disco music into their sound with hits like "Monday Mona Lisa Club" and "Kiss In The Dark" (the latter of which was their only U.S. hit, breaking into Billboard's top 40 in 1979).

Regional styles of disco

As with many forms of art, music contains many types, of which there are distinct genres, and within which there are various styles. The sound of a disco song, as with the sound of a song of any genre of music, depended on the particular tastes of the artists, and the arrangers, producers, and even the orchestra conductors and concertmasters dictating the type of stylized playing method of each section of the orchestra, down to the engineers and mixers who assembled all the elements to make a fluid, cohesive sculpture of sound through melodic continuity. Even without a very knowledgeable ear for music, one can distinguish the stylings of Van McCoy's "The Hustle" (1975) from those of Silver Convention's "Get Up and Boogie" (1976), and from those of Chic's "Good Times" (1979), and Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" (1979).

As such, many regional sounds of disco developed during the mid-1970s, as a result of collaborative efforts of many individuals with a legacy of formal education and training in music theory and orchestration, whose educational backgrounds laid the foundation for the musical genre that was to burst forth onto the dance-music scene into what would come to be regarded as designer music. It can be noted that many of the conductors and players of the large city symphony and philharmonic orchestras responsible for the grand productions of disco were seasoned veterans of orchestras throughout the country, some even going back to the big-band era. 

Transition from the disco sound of the 1970s to the dance sound of the 1980s

The transition from the late-1970s disco styles to the early-1980s dance styles can be illustrated best by analysis of the work of specific artists, arrangers, and producers within each region, respective to the timeperiods. Complex musical structures basically gave way to a "one-man-band" sound produced on synthesizer keyboards. Also, the increased addition of a slightly different harmonic structure, with elements borrowed from blues and jazz, (such as more prominent chords created with acoustic or electric pianos) created a different style of "dance music" in the 1981-83 period. But by this time, the word "disco" became associated with anything danceable, that played in discothèques, so the music continued for a time to be called "disco" by many. Examples include D. Train, Kashif, and Patrice Rushen. Both changes was influenced by some of the great R&B and jazz musicians of the 70's, such as Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock, who had pioneered and perfected "one-man-band" type keyboard techniques.