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**1/2 DJ Deep

RESPECT IS BURNING PRESENTS DJ DEEP

(Virgin France/Astralwerks)

The fourth CD in the “Respect Is Burning” series highlighting the Paris disco of that name, Presents DJ Deep allows yet another Laurent Garnier protégé to strut his stuff to house-music fans. Deep’s taste sounds like 1990, a time when house’s original format — jazzy, soulful, and mellow — still prevailed but was beginning to give way to deeper and darker expressions. Deep’s set does the opposite, opening dark and fretful with Kerry Chandler’s 1992 deep-house classic “I’m Not Dreaming,” then segueing back to Logic’s “The Warning,” a 1990 work that was one of house’s rst (and best-liked) ventures into deep stuff and the darkside.

It’s a song well worth revisiting. “The Warning” threw house music’s suavely joyous birthright into a bluesy turmoil that has not resolved itself even now. Deep — perhaps because he’s in Paris, not New York — sees it differently. In his set, as he sways smoothly from delicate “tribal” cuts like Lost Tribes of Ibadan’s “Avareh” and Osunlade’s “Cantos a Ochun & Oya” to falsetto guy vocals (in the manner of Ten City’s Byron Stingily) and baritone swoons redolent of Robert Owens and Michael Watford, “The Warning” is just another jazzy piano dance. The CD also features two cuts by the long (and unjustly) forgotten Blaze, “How Deep Is Your Love” and “Elements of Life,” the latter mixed by Little Louie Vega; “Life Goes On,” by Vega and Arnold Jarvis; and Kimara Lovelace’s trampy “Misery” as mixed by Lil’ Louis, yet another name from way back when.

— Michael Freedberg