As the name of his label attests, Jeff Craven likes to think big. Large, even. Fresh out of college and a newcomer to Chicago, Craven launched game-changing house label Large Music in 1993, with nothing more than sheer gumption, a childhood friend with a little money to invest, and a huge love for the second-wave house music scene that was unfolding around him, in the city that started it all. 

Over the past three decades, Large Music has kept the flame lit for deep and soulful sounds created by giants like Roy Davis, Jr., Kerri Chandler, and Robert Owens. The label sparked the early careers of DJ Sneak, Mateo & Matos and Dennis Ferrer, and expanded its warm, welcoming sound into the new century with West Coast signings Rasoul, Miguel Migs, Julius Papp, and Halo. Other artists like Fred Everything, Saison, Chris Stussy, and James Dexter have found a home on the label, as have newer, more tech house-oriented European artists Roland Nights, Evan Iff, and Matthias Vogt.

Crucially, Large Music navigated both the leap to digital distribution—it was one of the first dance music labels with a web site in the mid-'90s—and international pop chart success, with Davis, Jr.'s “Gabriel,” the 1996 release that helped kickstart the speed garage genre. The through-line of all this has been Craven's love for the underground sound of the Windy City, and his belief that its artists deserve proper recognition for their work. It's that conviction that led him to leap from DJing and party-going into the world of label management, even though he knew next to nothing about the business.

“I'm not sure what came over me,” he said with a laugh over the phone from Large Music HQ. “I just knew that I really cherished this music. It was a very exciting time in general, with house music taking off around the globe. But in Chicago, in 1992, the record industry had pretty much folded. There were a couple releases here and there. But the two main labels, DJ International and Trax, had moved on, and the way things went down with them… well, it wasn't a pretty situation. Many of the original Chicago house artists didn't know how big they were overseas. This was before the Internet, of course. There wasn't any way to know that your record might be selling tens of thousands of copies in the UK, and being played on the radio.

“People were starting to get wind of all that, and they were upset. Everybody was having a problem with trust. At the same time, a new wave of artists were making incredible music, influenced not just by the classic Chicago sound, but things coming out of the New York and UK underground. There was a real cross-pollination going on. I saw an opportunity to start a different kind of label that featured this style of music I was really gravitating to, while rebuilding the scene's trust in record companies.”

Craven's own journey into the Chicago underground was emblematic of many Midwestern music-lovers. While attending college in St. Louis, Missouri in the late '80s, he danced in clubs that played a mixture of industrial, EBM, New Wave, and electronic dance music—and soon began DJing school dances as a side gig. His ears perked up when house music began to creep more into the mix. “At one club in downtown Saint Louis called 1227, the DJ was playing a lot of the early Chicago house. It was really the first time that I've been exposed to it. Back then we obviously didn't have Shazam. My friend knew one of the bartenders, who introduced me to the DJ, and I was able to get a few titles from him."

“There was one track that I'll always remember, 'Time Marches On' by Jungle Wonz. I don't know why, but that was the record that gave me the fever. I had started taking a few trips to Chicago; I was studying acting at school, and I was planning to move there eventually, as the city was a hotbed of theater at the time. But now, my ulterior motive was to get closer to this music. When I moved there in the early '90s, there were some terrific underground parties happening. The Substance parties were where everyone was first hearing the names Derrick Carter, Mark Farina, Spencer Kincy. Hearing them play solid house all night long... that really changed me. The music just took over. I decided that this is what I wanted to do. I started hanging out at record stores downtown, in the Loop, meeting everyone, and learning everything I could.”

With no business background, Craven latched onto the book This Business of Music and read it cover to cover, over and over. “I wanted not only to be creative, but to make sure the business end was tight. I had heard so many painful experiences from artists. It was important that everything be on the up and up. I found a great attorney, who I still work with, to help me write my first contracts. I got my friend, who I grew up with, to invest, which was very lucky because the business was so different then. Now you can practically just push a button, but then you needed capital, to get the records pressed, secure your artists, set up distribution.”

Large Records, as it was known in the pre-digital era, began releasing bangers from hyperlocal players like Ulysses, Lil Jon, 95 North, and Johnny Fiasco. But the label's big breakthrough came when Craven's burgeoning love for East Coast house, especially Tony Humphries' Zanzibar scene, led him to approach one of his heroes, New York's Kerri Chandler. “It was that blind courage again,” he laughs. “I should have probably been mortified.” Luckily, Chandler had heard of the fledgling label, and contributed the now-legendary 1995 Raw Grooves EP. “That one really took off, and I knew we had arrived,” Craven said. “People were calling in from all over, I mean all over,”

Much larger success was to come with the 1996 release of Roy Davis, Jr.'s “Gabriel,” featuring vocalist Peven Everett. “I probably shouldn't put this on the record, but I don't care. Roy and Peven put this record together and they actually shopped it to Cajmere at Cajual Records, which was doing very well at the time. He passed on it for some reason. So they had said, well, let's take it over to the Large guy and see if he's into it. And rather than listen to it with them in the office, which is what a lot of Chicago artists would do, they basically said, here's my DAT, you need to listen to it, and then write a check. They just dropped it off.

“I went out to the car and popped it in, and was like, this is probably one of the greatest things I've ever heard. It was so spiritual, so soulful, so compelling, but also just raw and unique. Something that felt both new and timeless. I called back the next morning and signed it immediately. And here's the ironic thing about this record: When it came out in 1996, it just did OK. It wasn't one of our top sellers. For three months, it was moving kind of slow. Then, I'll never forget it, a few weeks before Christmas, I got a call from a buyer named Jeff at the distributor Watts Music, and he said, 'You'd better get ready to press 2000 more of the Gabriel record. Something's happened in the UK and it's starting to blow up.'"

“What had happened is that these underground UK DJs had seized on the 'Live Garage' mix on the B-side of the release. They were speeding it up, and people were going wild for it. It was one of the foundations of the speed garage movement that was starting to happen. And the funny thing was, if you listen to the original recording, the bass is pretty warped. Something went wrong during the mastering, where there was this distortion to the sound. For the repress, I wanted to go in and fix it, and Jeff said, 'No! That's what makes it sound so great. Don't touch anything!' Then the radio got ahold of it, and it started flying up the charts and then breaking in Europe. It ended up selling more than 200,000 copies over there." 

I'll never forget the feeling of having a record resonate with so many people, and contributing to the culture like that,” Craven said.

Recently, Large Music has been expanding its licensing arm, bringing its back catalogue to vivid life in partnerships with the seminal Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre company in New York and Vogue Magazine's “Inventing the Runway” immersive experience at Lightroom in London. But Craven still considers himself a mentor. “I'm still very much into deep house, and I love working with young producers who are just starting out. That's my niche and I love to help form their sound, shape them, give them good advice. There's brilliant tracks coming out all the time.”

As far as the deep house genre itself is concerned, Craven sees it as more than a nostalgic sound—it's a vital form of communal and cultural connection in dark times. “I understand that deep house is written in the book of history. Still, I look around at the roster of people making this music, and who we're signing to the label—they're from every corner of the Earth. It's a global network I could only have dreamed of back when we started, people from all over still drawn to something soulful, something creative, something so collaborative. To see how it's continuing and growing gives me hope.”

Listen to Large Music's 'Label of the Month' chart below, or check it out on Beatport.