Jazzy Jay (b. John Byas in Beaufort, South Carolina, United States, November 18, 1961), also known as The Original Jazzy Jay or DJ Jazzy Jay, is a pioneering American hip hop DJ and producer. He has collected roughly 400,000 records.
Jazzy Jay was born into a Gullah family in coastal South Carolina. He moved with his family to New York City at a young age and took up the drums, his first instrument. He began his career in hip hop in the 1970s in ...
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Jazzy Jay (b. John Byas in Beaufort, South Carolina, United States, November 18, 1961), also known as The Original Jazzy Jay or DJ Jazzy Jay, is a pioneering American hip hop DJ and producer. He has collected roughly 400,000 records.
Jazzy Jay was born into a Gullah family in coastal South Carolina. He moved with his family to New York City at a young age and took up the drums, his first instrument. He began his career in hip hop in the 1970s in The Bronx, New York, the epicenter of hip hop culture during the first decade of its development, at the age of 13. An early member of Afrika Bambaataa's Universal Zulu Nation, he was a protege of Bambaataa as well as his older cousin, Kool DJ Red Alert. Beginning as a Zulu King dancer in the early 1970s, Jay later became a Universal Zulu Nation DJ and was a member of the Zulu group Jazzy Five, with which he recorded the single "Jazzy Sensation."
Although Jazzy Jay began performing primarily at street parties, in the 1980s he began DJing in...
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