Jam Master Jay

Jason William Mizell was born on the twenty-first of January 1965 at Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of three children of Jesse Mizell — a Brooklyn social worker — and Connie Perry Mizell, a primary-school teacher. The family moved to the Hollis section of Queens when he was ten. The Hollis-and-Saint-Albans neighbourhoods of southeast Queens of the late 1970s were among the principal incubators of early hip-hop alongside the South Bronx. He attended Andrew Jackson High School in Cambria Heights through 1983 and graduated.

He took up disc-jockey practice at fourteen at the local Two-Fifths Park block parties of summer 1979 and across the next four years built one of the principal DJ reputations of the Queens hip-hop circuit. He met Joseph Simmons — Run — and Darryl McDaniels — DMC — at the Hollis Park summer 1982 block parties. The three formed the trio Run-DMC at Mizell's mother's basement in early 1983.

They signed with Profile Records and released the single It's Like That in March 1983 — the foundational moment of what is sometimes called the new-school period of hip-hop. The single replaced the disco-and-funk band textures of the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five with a sparse turntable-and-drum-machine production that became the canonical hip-hop sound of the next decade.

Run-DMC released across the next seven years the albums Run-DMC (1984), King of Rock (1985), Raising Hell (1986) and Tougher Than Leather (1988). Raising Hell — including the Aerosmith collaboration Walk This Way — was the first hip-hop album to reach number one on the Billboard R&B chart and the first to be certified triple platinum. The group toured with the Run's House Tour of 1988 — the largest hip-hop arena tour to that date — and was the first hip-hop act on the cover of Rolling Stone in December 1986.

He founded the Jam Master Jay Records label in 1989 and signed across the 1990s the artists 50 Cent, Onyx and Rusty Waters to the label.

He was shot and killed at his Merrick Boulevard recording studio in the Jamaica section of Queens on the thirtieth of October 2002, at thirty-seven. Two associates were convicted of his murder in February 2024.

He is honored here as the disc jockey of Run-DMC.