Mark Farina

Chicago's house tradition and the mellower grooves of San Francisco meet in the work of Mark Farina, an American disc jockey and musician whose name is tied to both cities. Working across Chicago house, acid jazz and downtempo, he gave his approach a name of its own: mushroom jazz, which grafts acid jazz onto the jazzy, organic productions of the West Coast and urban beats. Among his notable releases is Mood, issued on KMS Records in 1989.

A friendship with Derrick Carter, struck up at a Chicago record store in 1988, drew Farina into house music, and he began dropping De La Soul and disco classics alongside styles not played in nightclub main rooms. In 1992 he started a weekly Mushroom Jazz night in San Francisco with Patty Ryan, and over three years the club built a following. When it closed, he carried the name onto record with the Mushroom Jazz CD series, which ran from 1996 to 2016 and reached eight volumes. URB, MUZIK and BPM each placed him on their Top DJs in the World lists, and in 2000 he was ranked 72nd on the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs list.