Scratching the surface

DJ Jon takes Portland hip-hop to another level

By Sam Pfeifle

Four Elements of Hip-Hop, featuring the movie Wave Twisters, with performances by dj Qbert,
Obscure Disorder & dj A-Trak, the Floor Lords, and other special guests, at the State Theater, March 3, at 8 p.m.

QBERT: the phrasing of Miles Davis, the soul of Jimi Hendrix, the work ethic of Michael Jordan.

Maybe you don’t fully appreciate what a big deal Saturday’s “Four Elements of Hip-Hop” show at the State Theatre is. Let’s be clear: this show brings together some of the most talented people in the business; titans in their fields.

For starters, DJ Qbert is the preeminent turntablist in the world, winner of two Disco Mixing Club (DMC) world championships — the standard by which all skratch DJs are judged. Qbert is so good they finally asked if he’d not compete anymore, requesting that he take over as judge.

Qbert is also one of the first turntablists to deviate from the scripted routine, or “song,” on which most DJs who are performing rely. For instance, of his Saturday set, he says he’ll play “just what I’m feeling that day.” Characterizing what he does as “almost 100 percent improv,” he sees it as a natural evolution from the planned routine.

“I think when I was younger, I definitely had a routine or a plan,” he says. “Now, as I get older, I’m a lot more free. I think when you’re younger you do the routine thing, when you get older you become like a bird, and you fly. You can go crazy with all the toys you’ve acquired along the way. I think it’s more exciting to be free and see what comes of it, and see the beauty of the one-time performance.”

Qbert is currently planning a four-year training period on an island in Hawaii with DJs Yoga Frog, D-Styles, and DJ Flare, members of his former “band,” the Invisbl Skratch Piklz. “We’re training under a grand master who’s been doing it for 26 years now,” he says, though he won’t say who. “I can’t reveal that right now,” he says. “We’re going to surprise everyone with that information soon.”

Luckily for the skratching world, DJ A-Trak is Qbert’s heir apparent, winner of the 2000 DMC and International Turntablist Federation (ITF) world championships at the tender age of 18. Three years ago, at 15, A-Trak’s status as a full-blown prodigy was established with his DMC world championship, coming just two years after he’d first put fingers to vinyl. He’ll be performing Saturday both solo and with his band, Obscure Disorder, Canada’s premiere hip-hop outfit.

A-Trak can also be seen, by way of his skratch notation — related to musical notation in the same sort of way that guitar tablature is — as Qbert’s performance opposite. While Qbert’s skratches are free-form and loose, fast but no longer intent on blinding everyone with his speed, A-Trak is both masterfully quick and exquisitely precise in his performances. It is apparent, after only a 20-second demonstration for a crowd of onlookers, that he is in total command of his instrument.

His notation scheme is the next step in turntablism. It is the ability to not only write a song, but to be able to give it to fellow performers for interpretation. It allows for the possibility of skratch covers, and for advanced learning through mimicry. As Portland’s DJ Jon, organizer of Saturday’s show, notes, “There aren’t a lot of people who are showing [up-and-coming kids] proper technique. A lot of DJs, they can do a flare, but they can’t count to four, and it’s all off beat.” If they were to learn A-Trak’s notation scheme, like learning to read music, kids could train like your average grammar school kid taking tuba lessons.

A-Trak developed it originally for the purpose of diversifying his routines; writing them down so that he wouldn’t duplicate them, and so that he could expand upon them. Later, he would write down his routines to take advantage of limited studio time. Pressed to perform, he decided he couldn’t be bothered to screw around trying to remember just how he put the piece together the night before, practicing in his basement.

And for some, those two DJs will merely provide the soundtrack for Saturday’s performance by the Floor Lords Urban Dance Theater. They are to break dance — also known as b-boying and b-girling — what Qbert and A-Trak are to turntablism: the best at what they do. Originating in Boston in 1981, just before breakdancing made its first commercial push, the troupe now has a performance squad of 15 members, and a school with more than 100 students. They have toured with Madonna, the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Ricky Martin, and a host of others, and their theatrical production Floorlore is one of the hottest tickets in Boston right now.

Then there is this movie, Wave Twisters, reputed to be the first graffiti-art, feature-length movie ever produced, set in perfect syncopation to the sounds of Qbert’s first full-length LP of the same name. Completed just this past summer, Wave Twisters continues to gain momentum amongst the art film set, recently screening at Sundance to some pretty impressive reviews. The Sundance press calls it “an eye-popping, hip-hop-meets-Hanna-Barbara, animated adventure.” It is that — you’ll be agog when you see it — and it is central to what this show, orchestrated by Portland hip-hop guru DJ Jon, is all about.

First, Wave Twisters is innovative and completely new, like the multi-dimensional show Jon has brought together is for Portland. The movie contains no written dialogue, no prolonged narrative voice-overs, no text to help you navigate the story. There is only what Qbert has provided with his album; an Ornette Coleman-esque cacophony of sounds and beats, the skratch album that defined what a skratch album could be.

While it is not the first album of its kind — Qbert made others with the Invisbl Skratch Piklz and the X-ecutioners (neé X-Men) probably did it first — it is the genre’s defining moment. Just as Louis Armstrong’s Jeepers Creepers introduced the jazz world to what jazz vocals could be, just as Bob Dylan’s electrified set at Newport showed the world what folk music could be, Wave Twisters has shown what hip-hop can be: the art of sound.

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It is instrumental hip-hop, without the crutch of the MC, without “rap,” to lean on for popular appeal. There are no catchy choruses, no sing-a-longs, only snippets and phrases; sometimes blurred with other sound images, other times left to resonate with the listener. Qbert’s influences are diverse and far-reaching.

“I think from Miles Davis,” he says, “I get his phrasing and his poetic style; the way he plays is very rounded instead of sharp. From Jimi Hendrix I learned how to be just free spirit, and super-technical speed; just freedom of soul.” He even mentions Michael Jordan, “and how he trains hard all the time.”

With the album, his first as a solo artist, Qbert imagined a futuristic epic, a story told in skratches: crabs, flares, samples, and sounds. The Inner Space Dental Commander, with sidekicks in the persons of walking trash can Rubbish and the lovely Honey, must travel through inner space to revive the four pillars — or “elements,” as in Saturday’s show — of hip-hop: rapping, break dancing, graffiti (also called writing), and, of course, skratching. Along the way he must do battle with enemies skratched by Qbert and his old friends from the now-defunct Skratch Piklz: Yoga Frog, D-Styles, and DJ Flare, the man responsible for the skratch technique now known as the flare.

The album plays itself out in movements worthy of any classical piece, with Qbert commanding a symphony of sounds and often funny dialogue clips. He shows himself not only to be blindingly fast — the badge of the skratch DJ — but also able to find harmony amongst his whirs and beeps, and to tell a story; the hardest thing to do with an instrumental album, like Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain or Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet.

Hence, the album lent itself naturally to the movie graffiti-artist Doug Cunningham, also known as Dug1, eventually produced with the help of computer animators Michael “Syd” Garon and Eric Henry: 50 minutes of graffiti art, 3D computer animation, and live action. Wave Twisters is sometimes garish, sometimes cringe-inducing, it is almost always manic: visual skratching.

Qbert is pretty amazed with the results. “I wrote the story, and I gave it to the animators and the graffiti artists and they pretty much interpreted it in their own way,” he says. “I think the way it came out was a million times better than I expected. Those guys are from outer space or something, they’re not from here.”

And the reaction the film is getting gets to the heart of what Qbert is trying to do internationally, and Jon is trying to do locally: educate the public about the culture that hip-hop truly is. “Sundance was great,” says Qbert. “The people that saw the movie were like, ‘Whoah, that’s pretty different.’ We definitely educated a lot of people. It was definitely a step forward for skratching.”

Both Qbert and Jon want to show the public that there is more to hip-hop than what they see on MTV and BET. According to the Universal Zulu Nation — an organization based in NYC that celebrates hip-hop as a culture, bordering on a religion — hip-hop started as early as 1969, on the streets of the Bronx, during the block parties thrown by folks like DJ Kool Herc, recognized as the first hip-hop DJ. In fact, Zulu Nation was founded way back in 1973 to celebrate urban culture that included graffiti art, urban dance forms, and spoken word forms inspired by Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan — among others — that would later become what we know now as rapping. And, by 1975, Kool Herc had developed a style of creating brief rhythmic breaks that would become the basis of skratching.

The Universal Zulu Nation is now a powerful group that counts all the major DJs and MCs as members, including founding father Afrika Bambaataa, and has numerous chapters throughout the US. They preach clean living, artistic development, and community involvement in the numerous after-school clinics and summertime hip-hop festivals they run. They have devised the system of “elements” of hip-hop as a sort of creation myth for converts to embrace, and those looking to forward the culture of hip-hop, rather than just make money on it, are encouraging all of the forms. Hence, the Inner Space Dental Commander’s quest in Wave Twisters, and the show that DJ Jon has assembled.

“I think the reason why I wanted to bring all four elements together,” says Jon, “was to show people the reason why I enjoy hip-hop in the first place. The bombardment of mainstream hip-hop is just relentless, and I want to show people that there’s an option for people who are looking for the talent, rather than the money and the guns and the girls.

“I want them to have the experience of just to be looking at something and be awestruck by it,” Jon continues. “Like watching a magician roll up his sleeves and perform this amazing trick with no tools whatsoever. I mean, when you see the Floor Lords, you’ll just flip, and the same thing with A-Trak.”

Jon says that he is considering opening a Zulu Nation chapter here in Portland, if that’s what it takes to help the community. “Maybe some kid that was really into Jay-Z or Snoop, into guns, will come to this show and will see there’s a lot more to this,” he says. “It would be cool to do after school stuff with hip-hop. I’m sure there are high school kids who would rather be cutting than sitting around doing nothing.”

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com.