DJ Jazzy Jeff
What do you hope that they learn when they leave?
I try to teach people how to make records. How to make records doesn’t have shit to do with making a beat. Its producer etiquette. You have to know how to talk to people. As a producer what you are is a coach and you have to figure out the best way to get your team to perform. There are gonna be some cats that are gonna be like listen I’m a god fearing man and I need to go to church, the coach needs to go to church with that player. Then there are some cats that are like listen dog I need to go to the strip club, the coach needs to go to the strip club because at the end of the day whatever it takes to get the best out of this person is what you have to do and that’s what I try to teach a lot of them guys. You have to become a people person. We get cats that come in and you play playstation with them or take them to get a cheese steak and take them to the club. You do everything to make them relaxed and comfortable so when you get into the studio you can just knock the work out. This is a fun job, but you have to make sure they are enjoying what they are doing because that’s when you are going to get the best performance. Carv came down last week and gave me a copy of the new Musiq album and people don’t understand how that makes me feel. This is one of my kids who’s successfully on his third Musiq album and is knocking it out and doing his thing. Vidal and Dre got the first single on Ruben, Vidal and Dre got the second Alicia Keyes single. What you have to understand is that anybody that has ever had any affiliation with A Touch of Jazz I am indirectly connected with them no matter what. That second Alicia Keyes single is mine because my kid made it. None of the credit goes to me and I don’t want it the credit to go to me its them but I’m like the proud parent watching their kid make it to the pros.
What’s the situation with Floetry because I heard they are no longer working with you.
I didn’t really know them very well. It was a situation that someone brought them to A Touch of Jazz and in a matter of seven days we recorded ten songs with them. It was really good chemistry and we ended up taking it to Dreamworks, they turned around and said we really love this and we want to give you a label deal and we formed this label deal with Floetry being the first artist. When I took it to Dreamworks it was done and it took a year and a half for Floetry to come out. I think what happened with Floetry is that they got in the middle of me and the producers going through our back and forth trying to work stuff out. Me and the producers were together for nine years so when you got nine years with somebody you have history and you can afford to go back and forth. When you bring somebody new in its like you’re not really involved in this beef. You don’t even need to make a comment about this beef because this beef has history. If you don’t give a fuck about somebody its easy just to walk away but we had times where we would all sit in a room and be crying trying to figure out how we are gonna work this out because we spent so much time together. These guys were 15 and 16 years old when they came down here. So what I think happened was Floetry kinda included themselves in the beef and said stuff. You never got anything from the producers. Anything that came out into the public about what was going on came from an outside source or something that somebody from Floetry said. It never came from the producers because it got to the point where the producers were stepping to them like that shit ain’t really cool, this is a situation we are trying to figure out how we’re gonna do it and it doesn’t have nothing to do with nobody. It just got to the point where I was so disgruntled with the entire situation with them taking a long time to put the record out that I just got out of the label deal. One of the lessons that I learned was that A Touch of Jazz was built off of us finding someone that no one knew, doing something really good and making the world love it our way. That’s what we did with Jill and my biggest mistake was once you gave the world Jill everybody tried to come to A Touch of Jazz and instead of me turning around saying I’m gonna do it again you start to work with all of these established people. We were anti industry did some shit the industry loved and then became industry. The Jill, the Musiq, the Floetry was probably the time I had the least amount of fun. I loved making the Jill record that was the best time in the world. I loved the release and success of the Jill record, but when all of the accolades started to come in it was kinda like argh.. First of all I don’t like phony people. We were trying to get work before Jill came out and I can play you stuff we did five years before Jill and we were on that live instrumentation, soulful, and I had people like ahh man I’m not feeling the shit you need a sample. It got to the point where it was like nobody likes our shit. Then once we got on of course it was a lot of those same people that were coming at you like ‘What up Dawg? When you gonna do something?’ and I’m like I understand how the game goes and I understand until somebody says your hot nobody is gonna take a chance on you. There are very few people in this industry that are willing to take that chance. It ain’t like someone took the chance on us we took the chance on ourselves. Once it started to get phony you were like ahh man and Jill is a very real person so she started picking it up. Then you got people calling like I need one of them Jill Scott records and I’m like that was made for Jill Scott I can’t give you a Jill Scott record I can give you a you record. I didn’t want to become the cookie cutter but that’s what the industry is based on. So one of the lessons that I learned is that you can’t play your game and be in the industry. You have to pick and choose if your going to do one or the other. You have to decide if your going to stick to your integrity and do your music or play that game.
