First time I heard Jorun Bombay was on the radio. Growing up, I lived 25 miles from Halifax and so I could just barely pick up the weak signal of the Dalhousie University campus radio station, CKDU. Sometimes, I could get clear reception if I listened in my mom’s car in the driveway with all the doors open. Other times I would have to climb to the top of a tree on a hill with a portable radio. Every Sunday evening I would do whatever it took to listen to a show called The Groove and then its successor, The Def Beat. It was a thrill to hear groups like Public Enemy and Eric B. & Rakim on the airwaves. But even better was when the DJ would play local Halifax artists. And the best of the bunch by a long shot was a crew called Down By Law. DBL’s production cleaner and just plain better. They had the best DJ too. I eventually put it together that Jorun was handling both those duties.
In 1989, I saw Down By Law open for Public Enemy. Not only did they hold their own, they damn near stole the show. Every aspect of their presentation was as professional as that of Public Enemy or any other major hip hop act I had seen to that point.
That same year, I took over as host of The Def Beat on Sunday evenings on CKDU. One of my first assignments was to interview Jo when his new group - Mod’rn World Thang - opened for either Michie Mee or Run DMC (I forget which now). After that night, Jo and I hung out all the time. He co-hosted the radio show with me and we started making music together. During sessions at Jo’s place, he taught me how to DJ and make beats. He was a great teacher but I was never able to reach his level of skill because he was (and is) WAY more talented, plain and simple. Here’s a song we recorded together back in the day. Jo made the beat, did the cuts and kicks the first verse. It’s a product of our mutual appreciation of the Ultramagnetic MCs:
It’s hard to describe what makes Jo so great. You get the feeling he was born to make hip hop music. He studied the disciplines at a micro level and had a clear understanding of how it all worked. And Jo has an advanced musical ear. He and I got deep into digging in the late 80s and early 90s. Not only was Jo able to identify pretty much all the samples used to build any given hip hop song we heard, he could tell when the pitch of a sample has been altered so that all the elements were in tune with each other. That’s next level.
Through the 90s and 2000s, Jo honed his craft further and further, his incredible work rarely heard by anyone outside Halifax (too bad for them). Things started to change around 2010. Jo found a perfect outlet for his unique abilities. Frustrated with 12” singles of classic hip hop songs didn’t include instrumentals, Jo started recreating them himself. Not only did he have the know-how to put together all the necessary elements and components (including precisely replicated scratches), Jo’s ear is so finely tuned that he was able to perfectly match all the EQing, compression and effects of the original compositions. It was to the point where you’d swear that Jo must have gotten his hands on the master tapes and simply muted the vocals. But he didn’t! He built everything himself from scratch. Once completed, he’d post his creations on YouTube.
The next step for Jo was probably a logical one. Having figured out how to reverse-engineer the hip hop classics, he started creating his own remixes. For as blasphemous as it may be to say, I think he may have IMPROVED on the classics in many cases. He did a ton of them (I strongly encourage you to spend some time exploring his YouTube channel) but here are a few personal favorites:
Of course, work this dope couldn’t go unnoticed. It was only a matter of time before a person of influence would pick up on what Jo was laying down. One fateful day, Questlove of The Roots discovered Jo’s work and expressed his astonishment on Twitter. After that, the floodgates opened. Long story short, Jo has since connected with, befriended and - in some cases - worked with almost all the figures we looked up to as heroes when we were kids. Jo has become the guy the legends turn to when they need help. When LL Cool J needed instrumentals for his Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction performance, Jo got the call. When Rakim needed instrumentals for a recent tour, Jo got the call. De La Soul keeps Jo on speed dial. A few years ago, Jo told me Biz Markie called him to tell him Big Daddy Kane was looking for him. It goes on and on. Simply stated, Jo is THE master and even the legends recognize him as such.
So! When Jo reached out in 2014 saying he had an epiphany and wanted to record an entire album about doing laundry and that I was the only MC who could help him pull it off, I said, “let’s get busy” without hesitation. A short time later, the Laundromat Boogie album was completed. It’s bonkers and it rules. Listen here (and please consider clicking on that ‘buy’ button):
What should we talk about next? How about the mysterious Bike For Three!? Next week…