Thirty-five years after a Chicago teenager started pressing his own mixtapes, Mark Farina is marking the milestone right in the middle of Miami’s Halloween weekend. On Saturday, October 31, ZeyZey Miami hosts the 35th Anniversary of Mushroom Jazz, the genre-blurring series Farina built out of funky instrumental hip-hop, soulful downtempo, and what he’s always just called blunted beats. He’s bringing along longtime touring partner Nutritious of Liquid Culture Records, with vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Chuck Love joining Farina’s own set. Tickets cost from free to $64.15.
The Mushroom Jazz story starts with a 16-year-old record obsessive finding his way into Chicago’s underground through the legendary all-ages club Medusa’s. A chance meeting with Derrick Carter at Imports Etc. pointed Farina toward the house scene that would shape everything that came after, and by 1988 he’d landed a residency at Smart Bar. A year later, he co-produced “Mood,” widely credited as the first ambient house track ever made.
What followed was something harder to categorize: West Coast jazzy beats layered over acid jazz, the Chicago house he grew up on, De La Soul, disco, and ’90s New York hip-hop, folded into a sound that didn’t really exist before he made it. The earliest mixes went out on limited cassettes that sold out within minutes at Gramophone Records, and by the time OM Records picked up the CD series in 1996, Mushroom Jazz already had a devoted following. Farina still plays well over 100 shows a year, hosts a Mushroom Jazz YouTube series with Defected Records, and watched Mushroom Jazz 8 debut at number one on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic chart for the series’ 25th anniversary.
“Mushroom Jazz started out in B-rooms in Chicago clubs as an alternative to the house and techno being played in the main rooms,” Farina said. “35 years later it’s grown into this thing I never could have imagined back then, and I’m grateful to everyone that continues to support this music I love playing so much.”
If Farina built the language, Nutritious speaks it in his own dialect. Self-taught on cassette and vinyl, he works across deep house, indie dance, balearic, nu-disco, leftfield, and soul, running three to four decks with effects as live instruments rather than a fixed setlist. He founded Liquid Culture Records, co-founded the psychedelics-focused DoubleBlind community, and has toured Mushroom Jazz dates with Farina both across the US and internationally on Jam Cruise. His catalog runs from debut album Divinity through this year’s Solarmaxxing, with stops on Beatport’s Top 5 and rotation alongside Daft Punk, Tycho, Kaskade, and RÜFÜS DU SOL on SiriusXM. He’s played Ultra, Pikes Ibiza, IMS Ibiza, New York Fashion Week, and a special set at the Whitney Museum of American Art backed by the Andy Warhol Foundation. Mixmag summed him up simply: “Nutritious belongs to a different lineage.”
“Having learned by playing weekend-long parties, my favorite is the extended set where I can meld tempos and styles into an evolving journey,” Nutritious said. “There’s no wall between a soul record and a deep house track when there’s enough time to explore the full spectrum.”
ZeyZey itself is tailor-made for that kind of night — an open-air spot tucked into Miami’s Little River neighborhood, part garden and part gathering space, with tropical foliage, string lights, a serious sound system, and an on-site disco room keeping things going well past midnight. Limited-edition 35th Anniversary Mushroom Jazz merch will be available exclusively at the show, a nod to the cassette-era roots that started the whole thing.
Doors open at 6PM, with music running 8PM to close across the Zaku Stage and Tima Disco. The show takes place at 353 NE 61st St, Little Haiti, Miami, FL.
