On Valentine’s Day in 1970, David Mancuso hosted a private party called Love Saves the Day in his loft at 647 Broadway in New York, a few blocks north of Houston Street. He was an audio obsessive with a voracious appetite for spiritual sounds and a profound sense of community, and the event was an opportunity to bring together friends in a setting unfettered by commercial demands, or the restrictions of their outside lives.

Mancuso, who died in November 2016 at 72, didn’t produce music on his own and didn’t think of himself as a D.J., preferring the term “musical host.” Yet the mix of unorthodox records played at what became known as the Loft, and the inclusive ethos that he and his devotees espoused, became cornerstones for dance music. And as one of the founders of the New York Record Pool — an organization that helped distribute promotional vinyl to D.J.s — in 1975, Mancuso was at the forefront of asserting the D.J.’s role as commercial and critical clairvoyant. The responses of the dancers at the Loft could reverberate throughout the city and beyond, reshaping the American pop charts.

Parties at the Loft were structured according to three “bardos,” a reference to the phases of an LSD trip — note the first party’s initials — which Timothy Leary took from “The Tibetan Book of the Dead.” First came “the calm,” giving way to “the circus” and finally “the re-entry.” Mancuso didn’t blend or beat match songs together, instead presenting them in their unadulterated form. But the Loft was still experienced as a succession of intertwined stories, each chapter crackling with an improvisatory energy and emotional heft. A single night might include jazz fusion, Broadway musicals, searing Latin funk, sumptuous disco, eerie psychedelia, exploratory African rhythms, shrieking post-punk and much more.

The eclectic selection of music wasn’t the only diversity embraced at the Loft. Riding the momentum of the 1960s’ progressive politics — and with the Stonewall uprising fresh in the minds of many attendees — the parties were far more mixed than most New York night life, and Mancuso’s dance floor became a comforting, transformative space that aspired to erase the racial or sexual oppression experienced elsewhere. Free to dance however and with whomever they wanted, the Loft was where many people found their chosen families.