WHEELS OF STEEL
Acclaimed platter spinners DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist take hip- hop legend Afrika Bambaataa’s records on the road.
DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist: Renegades of Rhythm Tonight, 9: 30 p. m. | Commodore Ballroom Tickets: $ 32.50 plus charges at Ticketmaster
Joshua Davis clearly remembers the first time he heard Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force’s seminal recording Planet Rock.
It was on either side of June 1982, the California- raised artist known as DJ Shadow recalled, just as he was turning 10.
Armed with his trusty AM transistor radio, Davis was tuned in to trail- blazing San Francisco radio station KFRC, a frequency that had first paved the way for bands such as Jefferson Airplane and later switched to more “progressive” R& B, while classic rock radio found itself stuck spinning Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven ad nauseam.
“I had heard ( Grandmaster Flash’s primordial cut) The Message a few weeks prior,” Davis, 42, said in a phone interview.
“I knew there was something going on in terms of a new style of music. It felt very different than regular R& B. And then I heard Planet Rock. It was one of those moments — whenever I heard something I really liked or that struck me as being different or progressive, I would lean over and press ‘ record’ on this little tape recorder I had. It was all very lo- fi, just holding up the tape recorder to the speaker of this mono transistor radio.”
The perfect beat
Blending the electro style of Kraftwerk, the funk of George Clinton/ Parliament and the avant- garde new wave rock
“I knew there was something going on in terms of a new style of music. It felt very different than regular R& B. And then I heard Planet Rock. DJ SHADOW ON HOW HE DISCOVERED AFRIKA BAMBAATAA
of Gary Numan with spoken word rap, Planet Rock became Bambaataa’s calling card. Much like Bambaataa himself, Planet Rock, followup singles like Looking for the Perfect Beat and Renegades of Funk, and Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation radio show helped define modern hip- hop and electronic music as we know it.
When Cornell University in New York City acquired a large part of Bambaataa’s record collection — an estimated 42,000 records — Davis and longtime pal and creative partner Lucas McFadden ( better known as Cut Chemist) were given a golden opportunity: to plunder Bambaataa’s personal stash.
“The person that brokered the ( Cornell- Bambaataa) deal is someone that Shadow and I both know — he’s a collector,” McFadden, 42, said. “He asked us if we would do a mix to commemorate this archive and the legacy of Afrika Bambaataa. Of course we were honoured, but we didn’t just want to do a mix, we asked him if we could tour it.
“We wanted make it a big deal and share it with as many people as possible on a live level.”
The hard sell
Beyond getting the OK from Bambaataa himself, the biggest hurdle in DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist making their Renegades of Rhythm tour a reality was obtaining permission to take a chunk of the artist’s historically significant and pretty much priceless stash on the road.
“We pulled about 1,500 ( records) and shipped them back to a place where we could listen to them and put a set together,” McFadden said. “The tour is about these artifacts. We are DJing with these copies. So we had to not only hear the music but see how they performed.”
As two of the most accomplished DJs to have come out of the turntablism boom of the ’ 90s, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist certainly understood if a platter would or would not hold up on the road, and during the three- week process of preparing their Bambaataa set, they discarded several albums that were too battered and bruised — some even riddled with holes — to be played live.
But they also knew which cuts were key, many of them being important components of their own collections. Shadow’s stash is said to include more than 60,000 albums.
When asked how much it cost to insure the 200- 250 Bambaataa records they are spinning on this tour, which includes everything from old jazz standards to Sly and the Family Stone and Yes’ Owner of a Lonely Heart, McFadden simply replied with a chuckle, “No comment.”
Chemical brothers
As DJ Shadow, Davis created masterpiece record Endtroducing, the 1996 album made entirely of sampled works that propelled him to stardom. He would also go on to work as part of UNKLE, the production outfit whose 1999 album Psyence Fiction featured Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and other music luminaries of the era.
As a founding member of Jurassic 5, New York- born, California- raised turntablist Cut Chemist sharpened his skills with one of the best hip- hop crews of the late ’ 90s and early ’ 00s. McFadden was also a member of funk group Ozomatli.
But some of the two DJs’ best work can be found on their collaborative mixtapes, especially 1999’ s Brainfreeze, a kaleidoscopic, soulful basement mix made entirely from old seveninch singles, and 2001’ s Product Placement, which followed in the same vein. Another one, The Hard Sell, was released in 2007.
“I first became aware of Cut around ’ 95,” Davis said. “The first 12- inch I ever put out was called Lesson Four, and it was an homage to ( pioneering San Francisco hip- hop DJ) Steinski’s Lesson One, Two and Three.
“What ended up happening was that Cut’s first album was also titled Lesson Four. He had never heard mine.”
The two became acquaintances soon after, and Davis eventually asked McFadden to remix The Number Song, one of the pivotal tracks on Endtroducing. They have been working together on and off ever since.
“One of the most asked questions when I’m out on the road, whether I’m doing my own thing or DJing contemporary music, is when I’m going to play with Cut again,” Davis said. “We have similar ideas, we’ve been affected by music and records in similar ways. I think there’s just a good working relationship there.
“Like real siblings, we cannot talk to each other for six months and pick up right where we left off.”
Back to the future
Few would have doubted that DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist would be the best DJs for the Bambaataa job.
And critics have so far been raving about the Renegades of Rhythm tour, which wraps its first leg at the Commodore in Vancouver tonight.
Veteran Rolling Stone music critic David Fricke wrote of their recent New York City performances at Irving Plaza that “even the scratches sounded like history come alive.”
The presentation is simple: Two DJs each spinning on a couple turntables, showcasing the album’s original sleeves, with Shadow’s longtime visual associate Ben Stokes providing the visuals — photos of Bambaataa and other iconic images — shown behind the two DJs.
For Davis, getting the thumbs up from the 57- year- old legend himself after the two New York performances was amazing.
“It was almost like royalty was present,” Davis said. “There aren’t that many people on the planet I feel I would afford the same amount of respect for. To inform the audience he was present and be able to gesture to him and have the audience shower him in affection, it just felt great.”
McFadden admitted the influence Bambaataa had on his career was also immense.
“The variety of different cultures and genres he chose to share is definitely reflected in how I do it,” McFadden said, adding that the performance is a Bambaataa- inspired “edutainment” crossover between a giant party and a music history lesson. “Hip- hop isn’t one type of music, it’s all types of music. And that’s a direct inspiration from Afrika Bambaataa. He could play a calypso record or a punk record in a context where it’s all hip- hop.”
“What was exciting at the time ( Bambaataa broke out) was video games, Star Wars, science fiction, comic books. That’s what I grew up on,” Davis added.
“Hip- hop, especially the first hip- hop that made its way to me, seemed to sit well with all these other things. It sounded futuristic, more than music that was created to sound futuristic in sci- fi movies. This was the real deal.”