THOMAS RAMON AGUILAR remembers the night DJ culture changed in the Bay Area. It was 2003, at a weekly event he was throwing in San Jose called Spank. The idea was that he and his other DJ friends could invite their peers and heroes to spin.
That night, the guest was DJ Jazzy Jeff, best known for his collaborations with the former Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith. Everyone remembers him, of course, for goofy hip-pop like “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” but Jazzy Jeff from the beginning was one of the most forward-thinking artists in DJ culture. He was the first to get the “transformer scratch” on record, he invented the “chirp scratch” and he designed the Gemini PMX-2200, which was known as the “Jazzy Jeff Signature Series,” and became the most popular DJ mixer ever produced. On this particular night, with many of the Bay Area’s most influential DJs in attendance, he was about to blow minds again. “Jazzy Jeff is probably my favorite DJ of all time, so we invited him out,” remembers Aguilar.
He gave those in attendance their first taste of the Serato Scratch Live software. At the time, running a DJ set through a laptop was still considered taboo—it was still “cheating,” even in the tech-savvy South Bay. The difference with Serato is that the digital songs from the computer actually travel through a needle and are scratched onto vinyl grooves like traditional records before playing through the sound system. The software didn’t officially debut until 2004, but Jazzy Jeff was given early access to it and became its first big-name champion.
“He spun his whole set with Serato, still doing what he does best as a DJ,” says Aguilar. “That really opened a lot of people’s eyes in the Bay Area. They were sold on Serato. It’s revolutionized DJ culture.”
Now Aguilar, a DJ himself who promotes events through his company Ungrammar, is embracing the next level of DJ technology with an event on April 21 at Camera 3 that has also united two other South Bay arts players always looking for the next big thing, Left Coast Live and Cinequest.
“Timeless: Composer/Arranger Series” is conceptually heady but technologically remarkable event that at its most basic level is a screening of three documentaries that came out of the Timeless Concert Series in Los Angeles. However, expecting even the hippest audience to sit through three back-to-back concert docs seemed like a terrible idea, Aguilar said. Instead, the screening is a multimedia event in which J Rocc (founder of the Beat Junkies) will use the latest Serato technology to actually mix pieces of the film together live, into one performance—much like video DJs do at clubs.
The three films that will be mashed up into one movie experience were recorded at separate concerts in L.A. by the production house Mochilla. The first, Mulatu Astatke, was filmed at a performance by Ethiopian artist Astatke, the inventor of Ethio-azz. The second A Suite for Ma Dukes, was a concert in which the music of the late rapper and influential producer J Dilla was set to a 60-piece orchestra. The final film, Arthur Verocai, features the work of the Brazilian composer whose 1972 solo album has been sampled by Ludacris and MF Doom and others, making him the cult hero of a spectrum of artists from Madlib to TV on the Radio. And yes, J Rocc’s mix of the movies will still travel through the needle and the grooves before it hits the screen. Aguilar doesn’t need to understand how it works. He’s just glad it does. “It’s amazing, it is,” he says. “It’s what’s led to an explosion of everybody being a DJ. And it allows you to still be a real DJ. You can’t fake it.”
Timeless: Composer/Arranger Series
Wed April 21 @ 7pm
Camera 3, San Jose
$10 for the screening, $10 for the after-party, or $15 for both
