Jam Master Jay

Jason William Mizell was born on the twenty-first of January 1965 in Brooklyn, New York City, into a musical household. A precociously gifted child, he took up the trumpet at the age of three and went on to learn bass, guitar, and drums, performing in his church and in local bands before he ever touched a turntable. When his family moved to the Hollis section of Queens in 1975, the young Jason found the instrument that would define him, and by the age of thirteen he was cutting records under the name Jazzy Jase.

In the early 1980s he joined two Hollis friends, Joseph "Run" Simmons and Darryl "DMC" McDaniels, to form Run-DMC. As Jam Master Jay, Mizell became the architect of the group's sound, marrying hard turntable scratching to the crack of the drum machine. His work anchored a run of records that carried hip-hop out of the neighborhoods and onto the world's largest stages, making Run-DMC the first rap act to reach a mass, multi-platinum audience.

Beyond the trio, Mizell built and taught. In 1989 he founded JMJ Records, whose roster came to include Onyx and a young 50 Cent, and in 2002 he established the Scratch DJ Academy to pass the craft of the DJ to a new generation. He was, in the words of later writers, the man who created nearly every sound his partners rapped over.

On the thirtieth of October 2002 he was shot and killed in his recording studio in Jamaica, Queens, at the age of thirty-seven. In 2009 he was inducted, posthumously, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Run-DMC. We honor Jam Master Jay, whose hands taught a generation to make the record sing.