Discaire

[I]n the winter he used to go out dancing at five in the morning, and why? Because then the crowd had gone, the discaire was no longer playing for them, but for his friends, and that was the best dancing.

There was no one word to describe the variegated music we spent the night with. It was distinct enough for the discaire to begin a set quietly, build gradually to a climax, then let you down to start all over again. Do you remember that vanished custom?

While the selection of tracks was a pretty accurate reflection of what was being played in discotheques at the time— [...] the "mixing" was pretty appalling (the songs just scrunched together as if they were on a crowded bus and there was no DJ credited on the album, not that any self-respecting discaire would have wanted to be associated with it) despite the claim that the album was "tight and distinctive … professional and polished … never contrived or stylized."

The DJ booth was built in a glass elevator so the discaires could play for four different dancefloors at once, gliding from one to another as they selected their tunes.

The most famous club, Le Discotheque (French for "The Record Library"), opened on rue de la Huchette [in Paris] in 1941. With a discaire, or disc jockey, spinning jazz records all night long, the main attraction was dancing. Thumbing their noses at the occupying Reich, Le Discotheque and other underground clubs opened their doors to blacks and homosexuals, the same groups that would first embrace disco music 30 years later.

A third, a discaire, also died; "That's absolutely the last disco funeral I'll ever attend," my friend reported. "You do know, don't you, that they played all his greatest tapes at the funeral."