Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

NNSL (Mar 19/99) - When Jared Kirby says his job -- as deejay at Yellowknife night spot The Gallery -- is to make sure everybody has a good time, it's a bit of an understatement.

Essentially, Kirby has to gauge the mood of the bar patrons, which can reach a whopping 202 people when capacity is reached, and mould their moods with music. And sometimes the mood he has to work with isn't always great.

"Lately it hasn't been bad," says Kirby, who originally hails from Winnipeg, Man. "But a few weeks ago...you can feel it in the air, man. Just a bad vibe going through the bar."

So part of his job is to somehow dispel that mood, turn it around.

"At the same time, you can't push too hard," he adds. "You have to tempt. There's a fine line between being entertaining and being obnoxious."

He also notes that it is the people in the bar who govern what he plays, not his own personal taste.

And incidentally, if you spend any time watching him in the deejay booth, it becomes clear that he doesn't just pop a tune in the deck and let it play. It turns out that he actually creates music, mixing and layering already existing songs. His pace is frenetic, hands flying across the machines, fingers tapping buttons at an alarming rate. (He works with a Denon DN 2500 F, a complex looking little mixing board.)

Kirby explains that he likes to think of the stretch of music he plays between bands as one big song, with smooth transitions.

That's where "the book" comes in -- a record of "events" in songs, events such as a beat or a quick silence, that are either a signal to mix in another tune or a signal to layer in a another tune. These times are recorded in the book in milliseconds.

"When I'm mixing, I have to nail it right on a beat," he explains. "Sometimes a song is really shitty for the first 30 seconds. I don't play the first 30 seconds. Some songs are 10 minutes long but I only play three minutes."

Another fascinating aspect of what he does lies in the choices he makes in mixes. Currently he's working on a mix of Tribal Indian Round Dance with the techno band the Propellerhead. When you listen to both separately, you just can't imagine it...but then he does his thing...and there it is, the perfect meld, and what is, in effect, a new sound, if not a new song.

According to Kirby, when he listens to music, he always listens for the possible fit with another song.

As to his rising fame in Yellowknife, due to his frenetic energy and friendly attitude, Kirby is circumspect:

"People come up and tell me the place (The Gallery) is way better. But I get told I suck once a night. And I get told I rock once a night. I only listen to half those people."

Part of what the newcomer to Yellowknife -- he arrived in February -- likes about the city and his job is that he can get involved with the community.

"I get to do stuff that deejays don't do," he says. "Like the Caribou Carnival drink thing, I host beer olympics, the dating game. I love doing that kinda shit. I'm thinking of doing a deejay clinic or something for the Caribou Carnival."

Kirby got started in this line of work when, as a regular at a bar, he replaced the real deejay for an hour. When the guy showed up, he was fired. The rest, as they say, is history.

"I like to have the whole bar dancing and rocking, rather than just the dance floor," he says. And he does.