A decade since his wisecracking, slick-rapping cohort Will "The Fresh Prince" Smith high-tailed it out of Philly and on to a movie career of superstar proportions, Jeff Townes hasn't exactly been a man with a high profile. Yet for the last five years, the innovative DJ (he claims to have invented the transformer scratch, the decknological foundation stone that underpins much of today's turntable artistry) has been building a new empire back home.
A Touch Of Jazz, Jeff's production company, has been working behind the scenes, forging creative and commercial alliances, contributing to the emergence of Musiq Soulchild and Jill Scott, and, as a collective, making tracks for albums including Michael Jackson's 'Invincible'. It's the sort of production set-up that Sean Combes was thinking of when he inaugurated his Hit Men, and, like a P Diddy album, there's vast swathes of the often overly polite hip hop based music here that seem to have very little to do with 'The Magnificent's nominal creator. In his excitably ebonic sleeve notes, Jeff reveals that his input on much of this record was in corralling the various disparate talents involved, putting them in the studio at the same time, and, well, um, that's pretty much it.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Since Townes is capable of enlisting help of the calibre of The Roots' Ahmir '?uestlove' Thompson, the aforementioned Scott, and, on the slightly overcooked 'Break It Down', no less than thirteen of the planet's finest scratch DJs, his catalytic powers are formidable. It's just hard to find much of Jeff himself in these amiable, head-nod-friendly, immaculately crafted but ever so slightly sterile tracks.
