Scene & Heard: Farewell to Frankie Knuckles

FRANKIE KNUCKLES RIP: House music fans around the world are mourning the passing this week of Frankie Knuckles, a man who had such a hand in the development of the genre.

The 59-year-old New Yorker’s death was attributed to complications from type II diabetes — he had also had a foot amputated in 2008 after a snowboarding accident.

Knuckles provided the bridge between the fading disco scene and the birth of house music with his legendary DJ sets at clubs such as the Warehouse and Powerplant in Chicago in the mid-late 1980s, where he helped perfect such techniques as perfectly segueing tunes and using tapes to record and loop certain parts of a track to suit the dancefloor.