DJ Jazzy Jeff Interview
He's into music, not all the jazz
BY TOM MOON
Knight Ridder News Service

It took Jeff Townes a long time to stop being a sidekick.

As DJ Jazzy Jeff, he spent the late '80s playing the cool musical sage to Will Smith's class clown. The duo's chemistry, evident on its second effort, 1988's He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, was combustible: Jazzy and the Fresh Prince were among the first wave of hip-hop crossover acts, a platinum-selling example of ''cute'' rap that appealed to young suburban kids and their moms.

After Smith migrated to television and film in 1991, Townes fielded what he has called ''crazy'' offers for major-label deals and collaborations with the best in the business. The soft-spoken DJ chose, instead, to hang back. He quietly worked on the music for Smith's solo projects, and turned up with his turntables whenever Smith needed to make a rap appearance. He did DJ gigs on his own, earning a rep as a house-wrecker with a knack for blending vintage jazz and European electronica into his thumping mix.

GROUNDWORK

All the while, he says now, he was laying the groundwork for a different kind of supporting role.

''I'm not a spotlight guy,'' Townes, 37, explained recently, rocking back and forth in a leather office chair in his gear-filled Philadelphia studio. In this room, he arrived at a philosophy that puts creativity above the bottom-line thinking prevalent at the major labels, and generated musical ideas for his long-overdue first solo project, The Magnificent, which came out on a small British imprint Aug. 20.

``I never needed the star thing. To me, what's exciting is being in a room with creative people and coming up with ideas.''

And so, for most of the past decade, Townes has been building a place where such brainstorms could happen. He'd always been a magnet for producers and songwriters. For a while, the DJ, a native of Southwest Philly, was getting tapes from aspiring talents every week. In 1995, after taking over the basement space once known as Studio 4, he began inviting some of them to participate in a modest experiment in no-pressure music-making.

''There wasn't any place for people to get experience, to try things out,'' recalls Townes, a father of two who lives with his longtime girlfriend. ``I'm a big believer in making records without a purpose, that's always been the most fun I've had in the studio. . . . I wanted to share what I knew about the field with the next generation.''

At first, activity at A Touch of Jazz, as Townes' production company is known, amounted to weekly jam sessions and informal writing collaborations. Within a year or so, the crew -- usually a half-dozen musicians, beat-makers and songwriters, several of whom have gone on to open their own production studios -- began generating more fully realized songs, even though no clients were knocking on the door in search of material.

Townes wasn't worried: 'If you're an artist, and you're at the beach watching a beautiful sunset, you don't say, `I'm not going to paint that picture until somebody asks me to paint it and pays me $500.' You just paint that picture. What we did was write it, and put it away. Write it, and put it away.''

The library of demo songs grew, and soon enough, word of his unusual operation spread. Smith had hits with A Touch of Jazz productions, and suddenly established artists swarmed the place -- Paula Abdul, Darius Rucker from Hootie and the Blowfish. At the same time, the crew began collaborating with several Philadelphia talents, notably Jill Scott. Sometimes writing alone and sometimes in pairs, the producers and Scott developed songs that exuded old-school rhythm-and-blues sophistication and a breezy, jazzish buoyancy unlike anything else on the market.

The resulting debut, Who Is Jill Scott?, became a massive hit. What happened next soured Townes further on the copycat instincts of the recording industry.

''It was the same thing that happened with me and Will,'' he says. ``You give me a little creative freedom, like what made us an initial success, and they want to lock you into a genre of music and not really let you out . . . Suddenly everyone wanted to come to A Touch of Jazz for us to do a Jill Scott record. It's like, wow, you're pigeonholing me again. Even though it's with something I like.''

TAKING HIS TIME

Townes says that though he continued to receive offers to record, he wasn't in a hurry to jump back into the major-label world. ``I realized recently that in something like four years, every time I've talked to people at the labels, the conversation has always been about market share for some single, about big opening weeks and all that. I haven't had any creative conversations. Nobody in that world can talk about music anymore.''

He made that complaint to Peter Adarkwah, a London DJ who runs the BBE label, which is issuing The Magnificent, out of his apartment. Adarkwah, whose label has issued a series of innovative mix discs (including one, Babies Making Babies, from Roots drummer Ahmir ''?uestlove'' Thompson), encouraged Townes to forget about the industry and begin recording whatever struck his fancy -- even if the results were commercial suicide.

''I knew he was right, because that's how the best things I've ever been involved with worked,'' says Townes, acknowledging that it took him some time to ''deprogram'' himself from the anything-for-a-hit mentality.

Townes and his crew began experimenting. Someone twisted a sample from Roy Ayers' We Live in Brooklyn into a gorgeous Philly-strings atmosphere. That track inspired Jill Scott to improvise a back-in-the-day reminiscence, We Live in Philly, sure to make old-school hip-hoppers smile. Boyz II Men's Shawn Stockman stopped by and cut loose on a slice of gently syncopated neo-soul, How I Do.

MORE RECORDS

Townes says that by the time they were done, there was enough material for several records. And ideas for several more.

''You have to understand that there wasn't really a plan,'' Townes says of the sessions that yielded The Magnificent. ``It's not like I needed to make my own record. I just knew it was important to have the freedom to try stuff. And it's sort of sad to me that it took a little tiny label in London to jump-start that.''