DJ Jazzy Jeff releasing a House CD?!

[Kraig]

I remember Christian Alvarez coming back from the WMC down in Miami and telling me how he saw Jazzy Jeff show up to the Defected party, and play one of the most amazing House sets he has ever heard! -- It looks like Christian was telling the truth judging from this interview!

DJ Jazzy Jeff Talks to Toni Tambourine about his up coming release mix CD - Jazzy Jeff In The House his first ever mix House CD - Jazz talks about the Fresh Prince DJing and MAW.

Did you have an tough upbringing?
I grew in west Philadelphia, but it was the only thing that I knew so I didn’t really have anything to compare it to. It was a moderate urban neighbourhood – everyone knew each other, it was very close knit and there were families that had been there for ever. It was a real family type neighbourhood, you had your guys that you’d grown up with, the guys that you partied with and the guys you went to school with, and that was pretty much where my background in music and my personality generally all started.

How old were you when you started djing?
I started around ten. My brother was in a band, The Intruders, and they used to rehearse in the basement so I grew up around a lot of old soul music and musicians and all that. I also grew up in the DJ era with all the block parties going off that would have a band and then a DJ, and I kind of gravitated towards the DJ because he always seemed like the guy who was controlling the crowd, he was kind of captain of the ship and everyone went where he went.
I used to just ride my bike at about 8 or 9 years old to the block parties and I used to just sit in front of these massive stacks of speakers, watch these guys play records all night and just control it. And I wanted to be them, so I found this guy in the neighbourhood who was having a party and they let me come to the party with a big component set and that was it, that’s where I started.

Did you ever want to be a rapper?
No, when I started there weren’t rappers. The DJs would talk on the mic but there weren’t MCs as we know them today, that was a little bit later.

What’s a ‘bathroom DJ’?
[laughs] Well I call myself ‘the bathroom DJ’ because I started at ten and all of the other DJs were much older than I was, so the only time I would be able to get on the turntables and play my tunes would be when the other DJs went to the bathroom. So I’d keep feeding them loads of water so they would have to go and I could get as much time on the turntables as I could.


What’s your real name?
Jeffrey Towns. My actual DJ name was Mixmaster Jeff, but we used to go to this store called The Balcony where everyone would buy t-shirts and you would get your name printed on the t-shirt. But it was 25 cents a letter and ‘Mixmaster Jeff’ is a really long name and it was too much money to pay for ‘Mixmaster Jeff’, so someone in the store just said “you should call yourself Jazzy Jeff, because it’s cheaper”, so I just put ‘Jazzy Jeff’ on my shirt and it stuck.

How many Jazzy Jeffs are there?
Two that I know of. There was one that was an MC in the Funky Four Plus One in New York, he might be about two or three years older than I am. The irony was we were both signed to Jive. When we were signed as Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, they already had a Jazzy Jeff signed, I asked them if there was going to be any confusion and they said no, but there was – I remember going into a couple of stores where people showed up with an album cover with me wearing braids and these white boots on and I was like “that’s not me”.

Give me a low down on the influences on your sound.
That’s hard, when I first started playing it was pre hip-hop so we were playing a lot of funk grooves and soul music and the Philly International stuff, so that was where my background came from but it was great because when hip-hop really started we were there from the beginning so we got the very first record from ‘Rapper’s Delight’ onwards. We’d hear all these records on the way to school every morning when they were constantly releasing new records and we got all that first hand as the music was coming out. It was a beautiful period because it was a brand new kind of music to us, we’d never heard anything like it before but every day we’d become more and more aware of what was going on and so I really grew up with it.

Would you say hip-hop is as good as it used to be?
Hmm… I’d say hip-hop isn’t as good as it used to be to me. The appeal is a lot broader now, and hip-hop is all over the world which is a beautiful thing. I just think the commercialism has really been a real blow to hip-hop. A lot of people don’t understand that hip-hop isn’t so much a musical form as it is a lyrical form over any type of music – so you can do hip-hop over house, you can do it over jazz, opera; and what happened was it started to become what sells instead of the different actual types of hip-hop. It’s interesting remembering the early days when people were saying it wasn’t a music that was going to last, and now you can’t even turn on the television or the radio without hearing some music that is influenced by hip-hop in some way, and that just goes to show you not just the appeal but also the corporate appeal. I think that that corporate appeal has got into hip-hop and kind of tamed it a little bit.
I’m kind of happy with the development and the mass appeal but I’m just not happy with the focus on the commercialism side, it should be a little bit broader.

Is that part of the reason why you’ve moved to house?
It’s funny because in the early days I DJ’d when there wasn’t so much segregation in music so we used to play house, funk grooves, soul grooves, and with me mainly because of my affiliation with Will it was a hip-hop groove, so people had a tendency to think I only did hip-hop. But I grew up playing pretty much all different kinds of music.
So this isn’t a new thing for me, I have always been into house from the beginning of house – pretty much from before the Philly International sound. But it definitely had something to do with wanting to do something fresh and something that was a little less tainted than hip-hop.

What makes your DJing style different from other DJs?
I think more than anything it’s being very well rounded, especially since a lot of the turntablists or hip-hop DJs today grew up just learning how to scratch. I grew up learning just how to play the records – before learning how to mix, learning how to line records up and keep people’s attention, and then you learn how to mix the records together and then with scratching you’re just adding these things in and so on. I try to keep myself in the frame of mind where I’m very well rounded. I’ve never been consumed with being the best or one of the best, I just wanted to be very complete and especially with me scratching I’ve always wanted to make it very appealing to people who don’t understand what I’m doing. Everything that I do has to do with the rhythm – I try to make myself a part of the record from a percussion standpoint and not just make noise over the top of the record. Even when I used to scratch in front of my mum I wanted her to say that it sounded good without even knowing that I was doing something separate from the record.

Did you invent the transformer scratch?
The transformer scratch is basically a kind of on-and-off-the-signal in a rhythmic pattern and I don’t really like to take the credit for inventing it, I don’t believe that anyone really ‘invented’ anything. I saw another DJ a long time ago do something that was that same idea and I just took it and added a lot of the rhythm patterns and put it on record. I was very widely credited because I was the first person to put it on wax and take it all around the world but I don’t like to take credit for it.
The other DJ’s name was Spinbad, he’s a DJ out of Philadelphia.

What other types of scratch do you use?
I don’t really name all my scratches. A lot of stuff like that people have given names to, and I’d spend a lot of time practicing in my room but I never really retained a lot of the stuff that I did. When I play I pretty much play from the heart and whatever happens happens.
There’s a good side and a bad side – what’s good is that there’s not just one way to do stuff, but the bad side is that I might forget a lot of the stuff that I did that might be really cool.

Which clubs did you perfect your style in?
We did a lot of bar room parties when we were coming up, the main bar in Philadelphia was a place called the Hotel Philadelphia which was basically a hotel bar room in Philadelphia, there was a club called Ken Graves, the When Bar Room, for the most part it wasn’t so much in a club setting as at block parties or at specialty parties. A lot of them were after-proms or a lot of high school dances where I developed a following and then you move up to block parties, and the way you really perfect your style is gaining a reputation in the neighbourhood. I started off in west Philly and you have a ten or fifteen block radius where you do all the parties and then you would go over into another neighbourhood and if you do a good job then you kind of take over that neighbourhood as well and it grows. Then you go to east Philadelphia and then north Philadelphia and it spreads, kind of like a virus.

Did you ever do any breakdancing?
Absolutely not. That wasn’t me, I would rather to be the guy who was playing the records for the breakdancers.

You worked quite closely with Louis Vega and Kenny Dope especially on the MAW project Nu Yorican Soul. What do you think they would say about you?
It’s funny, Kenny and I have been like brothers for about ten years and we actually met on the phone. It was one of those things where a mutual friend called me with Kenny on the phone and we got talking about records. He was asking me if I had these old records and I was like “yeah, if you come down I’ll give them to you”, and he came down with the mutual friend and it was funny because I think he was looking at me like “Wow! That’s Jazzy Jeff!” but he didn’t realise that I was looking at him like “Wow! That’s Kenny Dope!” But anyway, about a week later he came down on his own and stayed at my house and we’ve been close friends ever since.
It’s also the musical sense, you know – me meeting Louie and all of us working together, it all really helped me a lot and during a time when I was a little bit disenchanted with hip-hop, they really opened my ears up to what they were doing in house; and the Nu Yorican Soul thing was a really incredible project and I was really happy to be a part of that.

How many Grammys do you have and what were they for?
Two, no three. I think it’s three. One was for ‘Parents Just Don’t Understand’, one was for ‘Summertime’ and one was for the ‘He’s The DJ I’m The Rapper’ album.

You had your UK breakthrough with ‘Boom! Shake The Room!’ How did it feel to break the UK market?
We actually first came over here with ‘Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble’ and I remember doing Top of the Pops and them telling us how big Top of the Pops was. But when ‘Boom! Shake The Room!” came out it was completely different. I remember Will and I coming over to the UK and we were doing this radio station and there was so many people outside the station when we got there that we were like “What are all these people doing here?” We didn’t realise that they were there for us, we got rushed into the station and it took about fifteen minutes to get over the shock of people pulling on us and grabbing on us. Especially having been over here before, to leave and then come back to find it so completely different was really a shock.

Let’s talk about the Fresh Prince, now that he’s a film star is he still your best mate?
Absolutely, we don’t get a chance to hang out as much as we used to because his film schedule is just unbelievable. Also we’re both a bit older, he’s married and has kids and we both have responsibilities, but when we get on the phone we try and talk as much as possible. He’s in New York filming a movie at the moment and this is the closest that he’s been to Philadelphia in the past five years so I’m going to go over there and just hang out with him for a couple of weeks.

What was it like when you worked together, how did it work?
Will and I have a very unusual chemistry in that we can have whole conversations without even talking, we were on the same wavelength. It was great because we both respected each other’s roles so it was very very easy making records. The hardest part of making records is always coming up with a concept and we would sit in a room for days just wondering what we were going to talk about and trying to come up with something, but once we came up with a topic then the rest of the song would come within about fifteen or twenty minutes. We would bounce ideas off of each other, I would pretty much do the music and he would lay the rap over the top of it and then we would kind of tweak it – I would say “can we change it and go in this direction” and he might say “can you break it down right here so that we can accent it.” It was built on a lot of chemistry, and I’ve never had that chemistry with anybody else because that came through doing a lot of shows and it was just a natural thing. We had each other’s back and I knew that if any kind of technical difficulties happened on stage then he would cover, and if you watch any of the old clippings of shows you’ll see that I would always start by saying the rhymes with him as we came on because I knew that a lot of times he would forget the lines, so I would always bring him into it. So yeah, we had each other’s back.

Do you think you’ll do any more projects together in the future?
We’ve talked about it. About three months ago he called me up and said he wanted me to come to LA to do an old-skool Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince concert. He was executive producer of a TV show at the time and for the wrap party we did a surprise performance that was just myself, Will and Biz Markie, and it was incredible.
Will is somebody who, no matter what he does, he cannot get music and the whole Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince thing out of his system. So he kept saying “you know what, I want to do some surprise performances at clubs this summer”, and everything has gone round towards us going in the studio together and doing another record but it’s just that timing thing. It’s really hard to get Will to do a record when he’s one of the biggest movie stars in the world, I’m like “come on, let’s go in the studio” and he’s like “man, I’ve got to go make this movie”, which I guess is a good excuse so I let that one go.

What kind of house music do you like?
I really like the more soulful stuff, I’m quite into the afro stuff that’s really rhythmic. I really like music that kind of puts you in a trance – it can be repetitious but it’s repetitious in a way that sucks you in and you just ride with it. A lot of times I can make music in the studio and then the way that I determine how much it rides is I put it in my car and if I wake up and I’m seventy miles away from home then I know that it’s good because it took me places. So I really love music that creates that kind of drive and that motivation to really fly.

How do you work out what records to include in the compilation?
I just go into the studio and pull out a million records and lay them out all over the floor. Sometimes it’s just a spur of the moment mix – I’ll just grab records and fuse them together and see what works. I’ll do it over a two or three day period where I get different bits together and work out what records I want to include, and when I’ve done that I’ll compile them together and lay them out in the order that I want. A lot of the time I’ll virtual-mix stuff in my head and then go in and see if it works out like I thought. So you kind of map it out in your head first.

Will there be a special Jazzy Jeff re-edits?
Yeah, I messed around with a couple of things in the studio – just remixing some stuff with a little bit of a different flair.

Do you play any Defected records in your sets?
Yes, and I know due to the covers. The one thing that I have always been really bad at in my life is names. I do not know the names of any of the records that I play, I know the covers, I know where they are in my box; it’s funny because people come up to me and they go: “Oh man! You played the such-and-such record” and I’m like: “I did?”
I just love music, it’s not about the names and the titles, but I’m good with the covers and I know the Defected covers – they’re in my Masters At Work section. But don’t ask me the names!

Looking back, would you change anything about your career?
Absolutely not, sometimes when people ask me that question I have a tendency to go straight to the negative things and say I want to change them. But people don’t understand that a lot of the negative stuff and the bad things are what formed you into what you are - it couldn’t be all good. So I think I’ve learned to take a lot of the negative things in my career and look at them as a plus because they teach you things.
I’ve been very blessed and I’m probably enjoying it more now than I ever have. In the earlier times with Will and myself when we were travelling, we didn’t really have our eyes open to really see the world, so we didn’t really understand the impact that we were having or even what we were doing. But as we got older we started to remember some of the places that we went and we couldn’t really retain it, so to be able to go back and retrace a lot of those steps with our eyes open, taking pictures and sucking up the culture and the music is just incredible.

So what can we expect to see in the future from Jazzy Jeff?
I don’t really plan a lot, especially at this stage now. I kind of look at it like a really big taxi ride, I’m just sitting in the back seat and observing what goes by. I don’t really want to dictate where the car’s going to go because then I’ll miss out on a whole lot of stuff.
I had the opportunity recently to do some work with Herbie Hancock and he said something to me about letting your music go where it goes instead of trying to take it somewhere, because it will always go someplace unexpected and it will teach you something. That really stuck with me, so now I’m like “let me just sit back and enjoy the ride” and maybe get a couple of cones of ice cream along the way, but just as long as I enjoy it!

What advice would you give to any budding DJs?
The first advice that I’ve always given is to surround yourself with honest people that will tell you the truth. A lot of the time there’s a tendency to surround yourself with yes-men that, when you’re terrible, will tell you that you’re great. I think that having an honest person around you always keeps you on your toes and makes you aware that sometimes things just don’t work. You have to be able to take that criticism and use it in a positive way.
But most of all what I say is to practice your craft, all aspects of it – learn your records, practice your mixing, if you want to scratch then learn that but try to be as well-rounded as possible because as a DJ there are going to be times when your in a situation where not everything is how you want it. I have always taken the approach that there are people out there who have paid to see me play, they might have waited ten years to see me play and they don’t care if the mixer is broke, they don’t care if the needle’s broke or the records are scratched, they don’t care if you’re hot, have the flu or whatever - they just want to hear you play so I always try to make sure they will be satisfied.
There have been many times when I’ve gone into clubs where things aren’t right and I always go through thirty seconds of emotion before I have to settle down and do my job. As a DJ people will appreciate you when they know that you’re really putting forth effort, and I think that sometimes I’ve enjoyed playing more than the people that enjoy me playing.

Words – Toni Tambourine
Jazzy Jeff presents his first HOUSE mix album released Oct 18th 04
Jazzy Jeff In The House on Defected Records.

This interview was done exclusively for Defected Records and can be found in video form on the bonus CD on the album.

[Clayton.]

Nice can't wait to hear that cd i've always bin a fan.

[-ff-]

jazzy jeff is one of the worst djs I've ever had the displeasure of seeing live.