DJ Fresh was only nine years old the first time he got behind a pair of turntables, which isn’t exactly surprising considering he was raised in a family of DJs and record collectors.
Back in Baltimore — where Fresh was born and raised before his mom moved him to San Jose — he developed a passion for DJing during nights when he’d sneak into his cousin’s basement. “I used to go down there and mess with the equipment and shit when they was gone,” he recalled in a recent FaceTime interview from his Sacramento home studio, sitting in front of his collection of rare keyboards.
Fresh has long been operating behind the scenes of the Bay Area’s hip-hop scene and, today, he’s considered an underground West Coast legend. His ongoing project The Tonite Show, a series of album-length collaborations with different rappers, has acquired a cult following since Fresh did the first edition of it with Mistah F.A.B. in 2007. Since then, Fresh has done Tonite Shows with the who’s who of Northern California and beyond: The Jacka, Yukmouth, Mozzy, and even big-name artists like Raekwon and Freddie Gibbs.
Most recently, The Tonite Show with Ezale, which featured the pill-popping Funktown ambassador, received a flurry of positive press and its lead single, “Day Ones,” is shaping up to be considered a regional hit. But Fresh is also branching out from DJing and producing. He’s the co-host of The Ask Patafria Show, a podcast where he discusses music, social issues, and sex with Patafria, an outspoken internet personality known for her uncensored social commentary.
In the late ’90s, when Fresh was a teenager, he started entering DJ battles and eventually placed third at a national competition. “Back in the day, if you were third in the USA, that was, like, known, you know what I mean?” That was when he got his first big break: Nas heard about Fresh from the turntablism scene and invited him to be his DJ on his Stillmatic tour in 2002 and God’s Son tour in 2003.
Fresh enjoyed tour life but didn’t see DJing as a sustainable career. He decided to move back to California, this time to Emeryville, to attend Ex’pression College of Digital Arts, where he took courses in video editing and music engineering. “There weren’t as many options then as there is today to do it yourself,” he said when I asked him about his decision to go back to school after his first taste of major professional success. “It was just a different time back then.”
During this era, Fresh got his first sampler, an EPS 16+, and started making his own beats and shooting music videos for them. He was still a student and didn’t know many people in the East Bay’s music scene yet, but one day, he attended an industry mixer at a local Emeryville bar where he met Keak da Sneak, Husalah, and Mistah F.A.B.
F.A.B. told him had had some freestyle videos he was looking to release on DVD, so F.A.B. and Fresh made a deal: Fresh would help F.A.B. with his DVD project and in return, F.A.B. would rap over Fresh’s beats.
In 2005, F.A.B. released his Freestyle King DVD, which was edited by DJ Fresh and became a local success. And in 2006, Fresh put out his first edition of The Tonite Show featuring Mistah F.A.B.
“We basically did a trade, I guess. I did his DVD — even though that DVD took hella fuckin’ long, that shit took months — and we did The Tonite Show in a couple weeks, a few nights even, because he freestyled the whole thing.”
Fresh said he envisioned The Tonite Show as an album series from the beginning and, over the past ten years, the project has produced some of the Bay Area’s most beloved regional hits. D-Lo’s “No Hoe,” The Jacka’s cruising anthem “Boomin’ System,” and F.A.B.’s hyphy slap “We Go Stupid in the Bay” are all Fresh-produced tracks that first appeared on their respective Tonite Shows.
Each Tonite Show has a different flavor: The most recent one, with Ezale, has a funky groove while Messy Marv’s 2009 edition is emblematic of late-2000s mobb music with its fat bass and airy synths. “My ’80s sound is like the DJ Fresh sound,” said Fresh. “But I have a slap sound too that sounds ’80s-ish, but it’s stripped down to drums and minimal sounds. But then I have a real jazzy side, too.”
In addition to producing some of the Bay Area’s most beloved songs in recent years, The Tonite Show has become a sort of archive of the different sounds and personalities that have shaped Northern Californian rap over the past ten years — a history DJ Fresh has had a major hand in.
“I feel like I’m finally getting some of the just dues that I deserve,” he said with a satisfied grin. “But even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be trippin’ because my bank account is good.”
