Bhumble
10-20-2005, 04:50 PM
Hip-hopper Nezbeat’s unlikely origins give rise to his likable sound
His hair is hippie-long, thick and curly, framing his massive brown eyes.
His neck says surfer boy: Instead of bling, he sports shells.
His clothes, half-ironed and slightly baggy paired with wide, flat sneakers, shout skater boy.
Take a ride in his car, and you’re likely to hear Esthero or the latest Coldplay.
And get this: He’s from Manhattan, Kan., a place not exactly known as a hip-hop hotbed. But Jeremy Hummel Nesbitt, 24, simply known as Nezbeat, is hip-hop.
Listen to last year’s “From the Huge Silence,” an eargasmic production featuring some of Lawrence and Kansas City’s finest lyricists over Nez’s beats, and it’s clear that hip-hop needs a lot more of what he has.
“One of the things I have always liked about him is he always does him,” says Miles Bonny, fellow hip-hop producer, half of SoundsGood and founder of Lawrence hiphop.com. “He’s not concerned with anybody else’s style and isn’t too influenced by other producers. He has his own characteristics that come out on his beats, and every producer needs to have that to make them distinct in what they do.”
But Bonny says Nez is a complicated man.
“He’s not the kind of guy who lets you understand him,” Bonny says. “On one hand he is honest, and on the other he is sly. He’s the type of guy that keeps to himself. He’s not that interested in many other things besides friends, females and music.”
His bandmate, Tim Wurtz, singer and songwriter for Blackout Gorgeous, says Nez’s personable demeanor makes him easy to work with.
“He can get along with anybody. He can chat with a nun or a hothead biker. It’s real easy to talk things out with him. He is a good networker, and he’s so prevalent everywhere in the scene. Everybody knows his face, his music and his projects.”
For Bonny, Nezbeat’s innovation makes him stand out in the crowd. He says it was Nezbeat’s creativity that helped spark Bonny to start Lawrencehiphop.com.
Isaac Diehl, Nezbeat’s longtime friend and partner in the hip-hop duo Archetype, says each beat is unique, and it makes it easy to write to.
“Sometimes the beat is so beautiful and melodic, and sometimes it’s hardcore.”
Nezbeat’s production backs local lyricists like Mac Lethal and Approach, and he says his originality is one of his assets.
“I think so many things sound the same right now,” Nezbeat says. “And I bring a more melodic, emotional feel to hip-hop and take it back to the essence.”
Some may think hip-hop needs saving, but Nez just thinks hip-hop needs a break from the monotony.
“There’s more to music than a drumbeat and a rhyme,” he says. “I think people should walk away from a song with the emotion, and hip-hop has been brought down to the simple and the catchy.”
The genre’s uniformity leads Nez to the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Jamiroquai and Coldplay. But eclectic tastes are to be expected from someone who is part of Archetype and Blackout Gorgeous, a rock band. Both groups have new albums, and a joint release party is Nov. 5 at the Bottleneck.
Nez describes Archetype’s sophomore effort on Datura Records, “Bleed for Them,” as melodious hip-hop and conscious lyricism, which is apt, considering it’s reminiscent of early work by the Roots and A Tribe Called Quest.
As for Blackout Gorgeous, “Tragic Logic” is its debut album, and it’s a lot like Portishead meets Radiohead on a rainy day. Nezbeat is the keyboardist, producer and occasional drummer for the group, which was once known as Invisible Sea and Ethereal before that.
Get cooking
Much like Kanye West, Nezbeat is an emcee and a producer with an imagination that extends well beyond oversexed lyrics and bass-heavy beats.
It started in his mom’s Manhattan kitchen 21 years ago when he used her pots and pans as a makeshift drum set. By the time he was 4, his parents got him a Smurfs drum set, and in the fifth grade they upgraded him to a real set of drums. As a child, he was exposed to a diverse buffet of music; his parents listened to everything from Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt to John Coltrane and Stevie Wonder.
“Having two cultures in your family opens your mind to more things than some people who may only be exposed to one culture,” says Nezbeat, whose father is African-American and mother is Caucasian.
It was in the seventh grade when hip-hop and its beats became a serious matter for Nezbeat. He was introduced to Hieroglyphics, Souls of Mischief, Del tha Funky Homosapien, the Roots and Wu-Tang Clan. It sparked a curiosity in him.
“I wanted to know how the beats were made,” he says.
In the ninth grade he got a drum machine and started experimenting with beatmaking. Then he learned about sampling, the basis of most hip-hop music and the core of Nezbeat’s production.
“I treasure it,” he says of sampling. “It’s an art form in itself. Despite what people think, it’s not just looping. I make beats by taking individual tones and loops from records and using live instrumentation. It’s about taking sounds and manipulating them into your own masterpiece.”
These days he makes beats in his studio/bedroom in his Lawrence home on an Ensoniq ASR-10 keyboard, the same equipment used by some of his influences, like RZA and No I.D., the producer who taught Kanye West. And he sells his creations online at MySpace.com. He averages $300 a track.
“I like sleeping with all of my equipment in my room because it’s inspiring to wake up to,” he says.
Nez has 10 shelves of records to choose from. He often spins jazz musician Roy Ayers’ much-sampled “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” to get his creative juices flowing.
What makes him different from other producers, he says, is his infatuation with melody.
“I’m addicted to melody; I cherish it in music. I try to make it the main thing that sticks out in all my music,” says Nezbeat, who wants to play more with live instruments in his production.
Nezbeat’s appreciation of music sometimes overpowers the lyrics of the artists he produces, even his own. But it’s his music’s quality to stand on its own that marks the sign of a quintessential Nez beat, says 25-year-old Wurtz.
“Sometimes that is a problem, but he knows how to scale it back,” he says. “He has a symphony in his head. A Nez beat is strings, horns, drums, samples all crunched up and mixed.”
Wurtz met Nezbeat in 1999 when the two were freshmen at the University of Kansas. They both lived in Hashinger Hall and were in the same Spanish class.
During conversation, they realized they had music in common. From Red Hot Chili Peppers and Radiohead to Björk and Portishead, they liked the same albums. In addition, Wurtz is a songwriter and Nez is a producer, making a natural fit.
Although Nez’s specialty was hip-hop, Wurtz thought his cousin Ryan, a guitarist, should meet Nez and jam.
After Ryan Wurtz and Nezbeat jammed together, they did the same with Tim Wurtz and the female lead, Erin Keller, forming the group that is now known as Blackout Gorgeous. Along the way, drummer Nick Urbom joined; it’s his wicked drums that can be heard on the Blackout debut. Urbom recently moved to Los Angeles, and now Jarrett Fulton is on drums. (Blackout Gorgeous counts recording engineer Patrick Thomas as their silent member.)
As a bandmate, Nez is not without his flaws. “He has a very relaxed schedule,” Tim Wurtz admits. “He shows up 15 minutes to a half-hour late. He is slow-moving, but I am not exactly the most punctual person. If all of us were on time, we could produce a lot more.”
But what Nez lacks in timeliness, Wurtz says he makes up for with personality and skills.
“I like the way he looks at music,” he says. “His taste is extensive, and you can see it in his beats. His musical palette is all over the place; he can grow out of any box he is placed in. Even when he does a hip-hop beat or an industrial beat, it will have a different texture. It will sound like a Nez beat.”
Beats over rhymes
When it comes to Nezbeat’s hip-hop group, Archetype, popularity is secondary to friendship.
“We respect each other’s opinion so much,” says Diehl, better known as I.D. He describes the relationship as good, frustrating and awesome.
The two met as children in Manhattan about 15 years ago. “I remember he still had training wheels on his bike,” I.D. says.
I.D. had a passion for the rhymes, and Nezbeat was in love with the rhythm.
But toward the end of high school, Nez started to take rhyming a little more seriously. In 2002 the two made the first Archetype album, “Freehand Formula.”
“I only write when I am truly inspired,” Nez says. “But it always stems from the beat I am making.”
When it comes to rhyming, I.D. says, Nezbeat’s skills are surprising.
“He has a way of saying things that are so clever and vivid,” says I.D., who released an album called “Displacement” earlier this year with Lawrence hip-hop producer Sleeper. “I am not used to hearing him rap a lot, and that’s what makes our latest album so impressive because he is rapping on it way more than he ever has.”
But when given a choice between the beats and the rhymes, Nez says, it’s all about the beats.
“That’s what I do,” he says of his production. “I have honestly never thought of trying to pursue a career in anything else. Music is my love.”
His desire to live off his music is partly why the music composition major didn’t return to school after his sophomore year.
“I was so into making beats, and I felt like school was taking away from the art I really wanted to pursue, which was beatmaking,” he says. “I couldn’t read music as fast as I needed to, and it was all based around classical theory, and I really suck at theory. I feel like I bettered myself more by pursuing what I love, which is hip-hop music and electronic music.”
His biggest fear is not being able to make music into a career.
But something else he’d pursue, if music wasn’t on the table, is photography. Gordon Parks is his idol.
“In high school, I was really into his photography, and when I found out he was from Kansas that got me more into photography. I like his style. I just love his work, his movies, and he plays classical piano.
“He is who I look up to as far as who I would like to be as a person. I just like the idea of him coming from a super-small town and making it to where he’s at. It’s really cool. I would like to try and do that myself.”
The small-town stigma is something Nez finds himself facing constantly, particularly when out-of-towners hear his music and are taken back by the fact that he’s a Kansan.
“The industry has a really jaded perspective on the Midwest because it is a farmland,” he says. “I think musicians worth listening to can come from a farmland. Lawrence is an oasis of music, and Kansas City is, too. They are art towns, and so many artists don’t get their shine because they are from here.
“People have this idea that we all sound the same as far as hip-hop or indie rock go, but I can name 10 groups that all sound different. It helps being from here because you get everything from the coasts, and there is still city life here. We still have our own style and an open-mindedness to others, too.”
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/music/12942639.htm
(wow local music news in the news section)
His hair is hippie-long, thick and curly, framing his massive brown eyes.
His neck says surfer boy: Instead of bling, he sports shells.
His clothes, half-ironed and slightly baggy paired with wide, flat sneakers, shout skater boy.
Take a ride in his car, and you’re likely to hear Esthero or the latest Coldplay.
And get this: He’s from Manhattan, Kan., a place not exactly known as a hip-hop hotbed. But Jeremy Hummel Nesbitt, 24, simply known as Nezbeat, is hip-hop.
Listen to last year’s “From the Huge Silence,” an eargasmic production featuring some of Lawrence and Kansas City’s finest lyricists over Nez’s beats, and it’s clear that hip-hop needs a lot more of what he has.
“One of the things I have always liked about him is he always does him,” says Miles Bonny, fellow hip-hop producer, half of SoundsGood and founder of Lawrence hiphop.com. “He’s not concerned with anybody else’s style and isn’t too influenced by other producers. He has his own characteristics that come out on his beats, and every producer needs to have that to make them distinct in what they do.”
But Bonny says Nez is a complicated man.
“He’s not the kind of guy who lets you understand him,” Bonny says. “On one hand he is honest, and on the other he is sly. He’s the type of guy that keeps to himself. He’s not that interested in many other things besides friends, females and music.”
His bandmate, Tim Wurtz, singer and songwriter for Blackout Gorgeous, says Nez’s personable demeanor makes him easy to work with.
“He can get along with anybody. He can chat with a nun or a hothead biker. It’s real easy to talk things out with him. He is a good networker, and he’s so prevalent everywhere in the scene. Everybody knows his face, his music and his projects.”
For Bonny, Nezbeat’s innovation makes him stand out in the crowd. He says it was Nezbeat’s creativity that helped spark Bonny to start Lawrencehiphop.com.
Isaac Diehl, Nezbeat’s longtime friend and partner in the hip-hop duo Archetype, says each beat is unique, and it makes it easy to write to.
“Sometimes the beat is so beautiful and melodic, and sometimes it’s hardcore.”
Nezbeat’s production backs local lyricists like Mac Lethal and Approach, and he says his originality is one of his assets.
“I think so many things sound the same right now,” Nezbeat says. “And I bring a more melodic, emotional feel to hip-hop and take it back to the essence.”
Some may think hip-hop needs saving, but Nez just thinks hip-hop needs a break from the monotony.
“There’s more to music than a drumbeat and a rhyme,” he says. “I think people should walk away from a song with the emotion, and hip-hop has been brought down to the simple and the catchy.”
The genre’s uniformity leads Nez to the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Jamiroquai and Coldplay. But eclectic tastes are to be expected from someone who is part of Archetype and Blackout Gorgeous, a rock band. Both groups have new albums, and a joint release party is Nov. 5 at the Bottleneck.
Nez describes Archetype’s sophomore effort on Datura Records, “Bleed for Them,” as melodious hip-hop and conscious lyricism, which is apt, considering it’s reminiscent of early work by the Roots and A Tribe Called Quest.
As for Blackout Gorgeous, “Tragic Logic” is its debut album, and it’s a lot like Portishead meets Radiohead on a rainy day. Nezbeat is the keyboardist, producer and occasional drummer for the group, which was once known as Invisible Sea and Ethereal before that.
Get cooking
Much like Kanye West, Nezbeat is an emcee and a producer with an imagination that extends well beyond oversexed lyrics and bass-heavy beats.
It started in his mom’s Manhattan kitchen 21 years ago when he used her pots and pans as a makeshift drum set. By the time he was 4, his parents got him a Smurfs drum set, and in the fifth grade they upgraded him to a real set of drums. As a child, he was exposed to a diverse buffet of music; his parents listened to everything from Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt to John Coltrane and Stevie Wonder.
“Having two cultures in your family opens your mind to more things than some people who may only be exposed to one culture,” says Nezbeat, whose father is African-American and mother is Caucasian.
It was in the seventh grade when hip-hop and its beats became a serious matter for Nezbeat. He was introduced to Hieroglyphics, Souls of Mischief, Del tha Funky Homosapien, the Roots and Wu-Tang Clan. It sparked a curiosity in him.
“I wanted to know how the beats were made,” he says.
In the ninth grade he got a drum machine and started experimenting with beatmaking. Then he learned about sampling, the basis of most hip-hop music and the core of Nezbeat’s production.
“I treasure it,” he says of sampling. “It’s an art form in itself. Despite what people think, it’s not just looping. I make beats by taking individual tones and loops from records and using live instrumentation. It’s about taking sounds and manipulating them into your own masterpiece.”
These days he makes beats in his studio/bedroom in his Lawrence home on an Ensoniq ASR-10 keyboard, the same equipment used by some of his influences, like RZA and No I.D., the producer who taught Kanye West. And he sells his creations online at MySpace.com. He averages $300 a track.
“I like sleeping with all of my equipment in my room because it’s inspiring to wake up to,” he says.
Nez has 10 shelves of records to choose from. He often spins jazz musician Roy Ayers’ much-sampled “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” to get his creative juices flowing.
What makes him different from other producers, he says, is his infatuation with melody.
“I’m addicted to melody; I cherish it in music. I try to make it the main thing that sticks out in all my music,” says Nezbeat, who wants to play more with live instruments in his production.
Nezbeat’s appreciation of music sometimes overpowers the lyrics of the artists he produces, even his own. But it’s his music’s quality to stand on its own that marks the sign of a quintessential Nez beat, says 25-year-old Wurtz.
“Sometimes that is a problem, but he knows how to scale it back,” he says. “He has a symphony in his head. A Nez beat is strings, horns, drums, samples all crunched up and mixed.”
Wurtz met Nezbeat in 1999 when the two were freshmen at the University of Kansas. They both lived in Hashinger Hall and were in the same Spanish class.
During conversation, they realized they had music in common. From Red Hot Chili Peppers and Radiohead to Björk and Portishead, they liked the same albums. In addition, Wurtz is a songwriter and Nez is a producer, making a natural fit.
Although Nez’s specialty was hip-hop, Wurtz thought his cousin Ryan, a guitarist, should meet Nez and jam.
After Ryan Wurtz and Nezbeat jammed together, they did the same with Tim Wurtz and the female lead, Erin Keller, forming the group that is now known as Blackout Gorgeous. Along the way, drummer Nick Urbom joined; it’s his wicked drums that can be heard on the Blackout debut. Urbom recently moved to Los Angeles, and now Jarrett Fulton is on drums. (Blackout Gorgeous counts recording engineer Patrick Thomas as their silent member.)
As a bandmate, Nez is not without his flaws. “He has a very relaxed schedule,” Tim Wurtz admits. “He shows up 15 minutes to a half-hour late. He is slow-moving, but I am not exactly the most punctual person. If all of us were on time, we could produce a lot more.”
But what Nez lacks in timeliness, Wurtz says he makes up for with personality and skills.
“I like the way he looks at music,” he says. “His taste is extensive, and you can see it in his beats. His musical palette is all over the place; he can grow out of any box he is placed in. Even when he does a hip-hop beat or an industrial beat, it will have a different texture. It will sound like a Nez beat.”
Beats over rhymes
When it comes to Nezbeat’s hip-hop group, Archetype, popularity is secondary to friendship.
“We respect each other’s opinion so much,” says Diehl, better known as I.D. He describes the relationship as good, frustrating and awesome.
The two met as children in Manhattan about 15 years ago. “I remember he still had training wheels on his bike,” I.D. says.
I.D. had a passion for the rhymes, and Nezbeat was in love with the rhythm.
But toward the end of high school, Nez started to take rhyming a little more seriously. In 2002 the two made the first Archetype album, “Freehand Formula.”
“I only write when I am truly inspired,” Nez says. “But it always stems from the beat I am making.”
When it comes to rhyming, I.D. says, Nezbeat’s skills are surprising.
“He has a way of saying things that are so clever and vivid,” says I.D., who released an album called “Displacement” earlier this year with Lawrence hip-hop producer Sleeper. “I am not used to hearing him rap a lot, and that’s what makes our latest album so impressive because he is rapping on it way more than he ever has.”
But when given a choice between the beats and the rhymes, Nez says, it’s all about the beats.
“That’s what I do,” he says of his production. “I have honestly never thought of trying to pursue a career in anything else. Music is my love.”
His desire to live off his music is partly why the music composition major didn’t return to school after his sophomore year.
“I was so into making beats, and I felt like school was taking away from the art I really wanted to pursue, which was beatmaking,” he says. “I couldn’t read music as fast as I needed to, and it was all based around classical theory, and I really suck at theory. I feel like I bettered myself more by pursuing what I love, which is hip-hop music and electronic music.”
His biggest fear is not being able to make music into a career.
But something else he’d pursue, if music wasn’t on the table, is photography. Gordon Parks is his idol.
“In high school, I was really into his photography, and when I found out he was from Kansas that got me more into photography. I like his style. I just love his work, his movies, and he plays classical piano.
“He is who I look up to as far as who I would like to be as a person. I just like the idea of him coming from a super-small town and making it to where he’s at. It’s really cool. I would like to try and do that myself.”
The small-town stigma is something Nez finds himself facing constantly, particularly when out-of-towners hear his music and are taken back by the fact that he’s a Kansan.
“The industry has a really jaded perspective on the Midwest because it is a farmland,” he says. “I think musicians worth listening to can come from a farmland. Lawrence is an oasis of music, and Kansas City is, too. They are art towns, and so many artists don’t get their shine because they are from here.
“People have this idea that we all sound the same as far as hip-hop or indie rock go, but I can name 10 groups that all sound different. It helps being from here because you get everything from the coasts, and there is still city life here. We still have our own style and an open-mindedness to others, too.”
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/music/12942639.htm
(wow local music news in the news section)