Raw Deal

While "the sound of San Francisco" means many different things to many different people, it was synonymous during the mid-'90s with acid jazz, a commingling of jazz instrumentation and snappy, groove-heavy beats. Today, most people involved in the scene go to great lengths to avoid calling it by name, but at one time it wasn't such a dirty word. There were acid jazz bands, clubs, labels, and even a local festival. And, if ever acid jazz had a patron saint in the U.S. or an honorary member of San Francisco's music scene, it was San Diego DJ/producer Greyboy -- although there probably couldn't be a more reluctant figurehead.

It's been nearly eight years since Greyboy's foundational tracks "Unwind Your Mind" and "Grey's Groove" burst onto the nascent acid jazz scene, and he can almost get through an interview without the term coming up. "Now it's not even an issue," he says with detectable relief. "Sometimes people mention it but in the past tense. People don't really call me an acid jazz artist anymore."

As a result of very deliberate career decisions Greyboy has placed considerable distance between his name and the ghetto that acid jazz became. Even in the early '90s Greyboy didn't play acid jazz records in his DJ sets: He preferred to spin hip hop and vintage jazz, funk, and soul, instead of their modern-day reinterpretations. So, after his second full-length, Land of the Lost, further allied him to a movement he felt wary of, he switched gears and started the P-Jays label, a low-profile, self-proclaimed "unda-pendent" hip hop venture. The label achieved its mission: "It kept me out of the eye of the acid jazz crowd pretty well."

What exactly is so unsavory about the term? "The thing that spoiled the acid jazz thing was that it became a specific sound, which wasn't the idea in the first place," says Andrew Jervis, vice president and artist at Ubiquity Recordings, the one-time acid jazz powerhouse. (Ubiquity issued Greyboy's first two albums and will be releasing his new one, Mastering the Art, this month.) "Everybody got this weird idea that acid jazz meant instrumental, jazzy, funky stuff when, really, if you were involved in the acid jazz scene, you might play funk and soul and Latin and Brazilian and a bit of hip hop."

"And anyone who claims they're acid jazz is pretty illegit," concludes Greyboy.

Had he grown up in New York City Greyboy (né Andreas Stevens) might never have been sucked into such a misclassification quagmire -- he'd probably just be known as a hip hop producer. But when Run-D.M.C.'s self-titled debut album came out in 1984, most San Diegoans didn't even know what rap was. Marooned in the indifferent beach community, Greyboy started scratching, buying records, and digging for information about new releases and like-minded people. At 16 he tracked down and joined a local DJ crew. The leader gave him his handle, saying he had the soul of a black person and the lineage of a white man. Black and white made grey.

When the English Disco Mix Club (or DMC, as it was known) launched a U.S. version of its DJ battle competitions in 1988, Greyboy entered the West Coast championships -- although he was too young to legally enter the club. "I had to sit in the office the whole time while everybody else performed," he recalls. "And as soon as it was my turn, I went out and did my routine, and then they put me back in the office until they announced the winner." Greyboy took first prize. "I came out for two minutes to receive the award and then I had to leave. I knew pretty much from that point on what I wanted to do."

With few places to gig in his hometown, he decided to visit England, figuring the home of the only DJ battle organization in the world must have something to offer a hungry selector. There, he discovered the rare groove scene, a coalescing network of record collectors and DJs like Gilles Peterson whose sole purpose was to unearth long-forgotten funk and jazz gems. "I was able to get a lot of information about music that I just could not get when I was in San Diego -- even about American groups," Greyboy says. "I came back with knowledge, a bunch of records basically."

Most important, he realized that the drought of MCs in his hometown didn't preclude him from producing hip hop-oriented tracks of his own. "The cool thing was that it made me replace the MCs with live instrumentation, but with guys that ripped. I didn't want some high school sax player -- I wanted someone who could play like a dope MC."

San Diego proved to have an untapped wealth of musicians, including tenor saxophonist Karl Denson. The pair recorded "Unwind Your Mind" and "Grey's Groove" in their first session together, with Denson soloing over Greyboy's simple, infectious drum loops. Ubiquity owners Michael and Jody McFadin, who ran the Groove Merchant shop in S.F.'s Lower Haight from which Greyboy ordered rare grooves, offered to include the cuts on the label's Home Cookin' compilation.