Interview with DJ Kenny Ken (The Cheeba Crew)

                                             Interview with DJ Kenny Ken (The Cheeba Crew)

                                                 

DJ Kenny Ken (The Cheeba Crew)

                                    conducted by Sir Norin Rad (The Intruders /Germany)

SIR NORIN RAD:"Where exactly were you born and raised at?"

DJ KENNY KEN:" Actually I was born in Manhattan, but we moved to the Bronx. So I basically grew up in the Bronx."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Could you please elaborate on which area of the Bronx you grew up in?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"Actually I was raised on the edge of the South Bronx. I grew up on 1585 172nd Street which is Bronx River. It's one block up from Bronx River Projects, so that's the area I grew up.  Right across from 1585 is James Monroe High School."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Isn't Bronx River also considered to be a part of the East Side of the Bronx?" 

DJ KENNY KEN:"Yes, it is considered East Side and then there is the 3rd Avenue Bridge which is a little bit further down south.....maybe two miles and then you're in the South Bronx."

SIR NORIN RAD:"When were you born?" 

DJ KENNY KEN: "I was born in 1961."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Do you recall to what kind of music you were exposed to as a child?" 

DJ KENNY KEN:"As a child I was exposed to all kinds of music. Mostly R&B kind of things of the day. My parents would play music throughout the house....you know, they would play records.. whether it was 5th Dimension, whether it was Bill Withers. My uncle happened to be a musician. My father was a musician as well. He played with the Jimmy Castor Bunch initially and when I was born he had to get a full-time kind of job and he went to work in the post office and then he went to work in the New York City Police Department. My uncle on the other side was working with various people. He is the one that plays the bells in "Take Me To Mardi Gras" by Bob James (a legendary BX breakbeat). So when that Bob James album came out his name was on there. His name is Arthur Jenkins. My last name is Jenkins as well. I'm Kenneth Jenkins. He was into jazz and all kinds of things. He was a percussionist and he also played the clavinet. So yeah, we listened to a bunch of records.....to all that Soul and Funk music that was going on at the time. So we heard all of those things."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Please describe your very first encounter with Hiphop Culture. Were you a B-Boy? Did you bomb the trains back then? Or did your first encounter with Hiphop take place through attending a park jam?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"It was very interesting 'cause one I was growing up in Bronx River and I was engaged with the precursor of the Zulu Nation which was called actually The Organization. I grew up in that neighbourhood. All that obviously started out with a gang...the Black Spades...before it started to elevate but I was around music and I remember being at Junior High School 123 with DJ Afrika Bambaataa. I saw Breakdancing in the street and there was a touch of gang to that but it was less of that and more of people being in the street and playing music and having a great time. So those were the first things that I started hearing and seeing as far as Hiphop is concerned. Bambaataa and them were in Bronx River and they played music outside in the park but they also played in 123 and I remember when it was like,"The place to be on Friday night is 123!"  So I was a young impressionable teenager at that particular time."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Could you please describe what went through your mind and soul when you heard breakbeats for the very first time? You have just mentioned DJ Afrika Bambaataa who was widely known as "Master Of Records" back then since he had such a huge record collection and was also extremely knoweldgeable when it came to breakbeats. I was told that he actually enlarged the original first generation breakbeat canon which had been established by Kool DJ Herc by adding obscure African, Latin, Caribbean and European beats to it that nobody had ever heard before in the BX......"

DJ KENNY KEN:"Afrika Bambaataa was definitely a rebel when it came to identifying and finding those breaks. I mean we're talking about things like "Planetary Citizen" by The  Mahavishnu Orchestra.  I heard that beat nowhere else! When Afrika Bambaataa was doing his thing a lot of us would go to Downstairs Records which was at 42nd Street. That's where the record store was...People would go through 45s and albums to find those breakbeats and then the next thing you know the knowledge of those beats started to move around. Bambaataa was able to expand the foundation of Hiphop music. You're talking about records that were Rock records  like "Rocket In The Pocket" by Cerrone. DJ Charlie Chase of the Cold Crush Brothers would later speed up that record for his MCees. To be able to look at any piece of  music and to listen to the music and to find a beat out of that was a unique skill and Bambaataa had that skill. He also inroduced a lot of Jazz to Hiphop.....like "You And Music" by Donald Byrd. People like me were behind Grandmaster Flash, Grandwizard Theodore and those folks....again those were South Bronx folks. Most of us almost had something like a test record when we were warming up the sound system, you know when we plugged in to a street light or something like that. A lot of us would start with "Rock Creek Park" by The Blackbyrds just to get the people listening and then we went from there. I grew up in the Bronx but then we moved to Mount Vernon. So we moved to Mount Vernon when I was about sixteen years old but I still had all my connections. I mean I was sixteen years old, right?  I was in high school already. I was going to Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx. So I'm up in Mount Vernon but I'm actually  driving back down to the Bronx. I would also go to Manhattan to go to Downstairs Records.....We would take the train et cetera. We would be moving around, being in Co-op City. We would do parties there and we would also do parties in The Valley which is right across from Co-op City. The Kaos Crew was there, T Ski Valley and his crew was there.. all of those kind of folks. We would be in parks where shootouts would happen. It's interesting because I think that the people that owned the equipment at that time for people like The Kaos Crew they owned a reggae record store and they had the kick ass boxes in there...you know, the bass boxes... and they would bring them out so that the DJ of The Kaos Crew would be able to play different things.  They were actually connected to that reggae record store. So there are a lot of interesting things that happened in that era.We got to know different people, moving around in different areas and building a reputation for music and MCing. I also did a little bit of graffiti stuff with Blade (legendary BX Writer). He was one of my good friend's brothers and we would hang out with him and do some bombing and that kind of stuff on the trains. He's an incomparable, supertalented guy. I continued to be in contact with his little brother. He's a good friend. He was in my wedding." 

November 30th, 1979: The Cheeba Crew performs at The Edenwald Center in the Bronx

 

SIR NORIN RAD:"What exactly made you pick up DJing?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"You know what? I think it was an ecclectic group of people who inspired me to start DJing. DJ Breakout and DJ Baron were up on the 233rd Street / Gun Hill Road area. They were a major influence as far as making us say,"Oh yeah, we gonna make a crew!!" That we gotta do DJing and MCing. Another guy...Sir Rockwell.....he was a friend of mine at school...we both went to Fordham Preparatory School. He had some things going on as far as MCing was concerned. We were to match things up and we created this group..we created the Cheeba Crew. Him and my brother....Kev Ski... they were more into MCing and I was more of a smooth blending DJ at that particular time.  Then there was also MC A.J. Rock who unfortunately passed away at a very early age. He was from Burke Avenue in the Bronx. We had the music in the Bronx. You know, DJ Breakout, DJ Baron... all those folks that were doing their thing. And DJ Chuck Chillout! Chuck Chillout was a  friend of ours that was engaged with us before he went to a different level. At that time someone asked us to do a party. That party was supposed to be at a community center that was on 225th Street. You know, we were hanging out on 224th Street 'cause that's where Sir Rockwell lived at that particular time. We had friends in the neighbourhood and some of them asked us, "Could you do a party for us?" They said to us that they would put out flyers and all that but for whatever reason that party didn't happen. The community center didn't let us in. So what we did was we went down the block to the T-Connection and Ritchie Tee let us play there. So we moved the party from this little community center to the T-Connection and now we're connected to  Ritchie Tee and now we're with DJ Breakout, DJ Baron and all of these folks. So that's how that elevated. In my mind it wasn't a specific DJ that inspired me but it was more us performing together as a group. One night my MCees who would later call themselves The Awesome Four came up to me and they said to me, "Hey Ken, you need to be a little bit more snazy on the wheels of steel!" They asked me to elevate my style of DJing. So that's when I started doing all that cutting and scratching as opposed to blending beats together. I then also started using different kind of breaks. Going back to my musical background as I said I was exposed to different kinds of music from a very young age because of my father and my uncle. I mean it wasn't breakbeats but through them I certainly got into music. So that's where it started for me and I was able to sit and listen to a full record. That's how I found many breakbeats that other DJs didn't even know about. Many times DJs would just hear the intro of the song and that's where they would pick their beats from. Well, as you know, Norin, a lot of those beats are buried  in the middle of the song and if you don't listen to the whole record you might never hear that specific break." 

                                                             

The Cheeba Crew

SIR NORIN RAD:"Having a powerful soundsystem was an integral part of being a DJ back then. Please describe the soundsystem that the Cheeba Crew had!"

DJ KENNY KEN:"It's really interesting because my dad was a music afficionado, right? So he had a Kenwood amplifier. We would use his amp whenever we played somewhere. One day we went down to Crazy Eddie which was close to Washington Square Park and we bought a Kenwood system. When we bought this system the sales person played "Primal Scream" by Maynard Ferguson and that first trumpet sound in the beginning of that song was what sold us on taking those speakers that day. So my father's Kenwood amp was probably maybe 200 Watt  and we would use that as our bass amplifier. So then I started buying equipment. I bought two turntables and we bought microphones. We bought Shure microphones because Sha Rock and them (The Funky Four MCees) had Shure microphones. Most of us came from well-off families so we were able to say, "We can buy all these things." So we bought Shure microphones and mic stands from Sam Ash and all these folks on 47th Street in Manhattan. We went into different guitar stores and bought those kind of things and that's what we started with. We also tried to build a couple of ass-kickers and we would put them in the back of the car and drive them where we needed to go from a park perspective. It was nights with DJ Chuck Chillout and those folks in the Bronx, around Edenwald Projects. So we gradually built that system. My dad asked me one day,"Do you want to be a DJ or do you want to go to college?" I said,"Dad, I'm going to college eventually but I'm having a great time with this stuff!" He asked me this question because I was spending significant amounts of money purchasing all these things. When we played at the T-Connection and the Stardust Ballroom they had a house system. When I was about 19, 20 years old I eventually became the house DJ at this place called Cromwell's Pub which was on White Plains Road." 

SIR NORIN RAD:"When was the Cheeba Crew formed?"

DJ KENNY KEN:" 1977/78. That's when we formed the Cheeba Crew. Remember I'm a Bronx kid. When we moved from the Bronx to Mount Vernon we lived on that side of Mount Vernon which is closest to Pelham. In 1978/79 my brother Kev Ski was going to Mount Vernon High School, so we started giving parties in Mount Vernon High School and we also played in the Bronx."

                                                       

June 15th, 1979: The Cheeba Crew performs at the Saratoga Plaza in Mount Vernon

SIR NORIN RAD:"Why did you choose that name Cheeba Crew? Did that have anything to do with that famous Breakbeat "Smoke Cheeba Cheeba" by George Benson & The Harlem Underground Band?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"Yeah! (laughs) That's probably how it started. We were also doing a little bit of marijuana at the time and I think that's how it started. We were hanging out in the basement. We also had Ghetto Children Production. You'll find that name on a lot of our flyers. And I remember my mother looking at me and saying,"Ghetto Children Production! Really?" (Laughs). There was obviously another Cheeba Crew in Harlem but they had nothing to do with us."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Why is your brother Kev Ski always listed as MC / DJ Kev Ski on your flyers?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"Because he would DJ as well. At first he was doing it even more than our other DJ Mighty Mike. DJ Mighty Mike lived down on Burke Avenue in the Bronx. At first he didn't have any equipment at all. So he couldn't practice at home. Later on he got himself a pair of turntables. We had the equipment....Kev Ski and I had the equipment in our house. So we had the turntables set up all the time. That's why at first mostly Kev Ski would give me a break at parties and get on the turntables. Then later on DJ Mighty Mike would do that and Kev Ski focussed on MCing. I was the number one DJ of the Cheeba Crew. Basically, I didn't do any MCing at all. The Awesome Four were in charge of that. The original Awesome Four were Kev Ski, Sir Rockwell, A.J. Rock and Junie C. We also had a female MC by the name of Chocolate Chip for a while. She was the across the street neighbour to Sir Rockwell. She was still very young, so sometimes she couldn't go out and perform with us. Then after we had moved to Mount Vernon she wasn't able to come up to our apartment regularly where we had all of our equipment and where we were rehearsing. That's why Chocolate Chip wasn't able to elevate her skill level and we eventually parted ways. She wasn't as powerful as Hi-Cee (legendary female BX MC who rocked for Touch Of Class and Inner City Diso) though. Sir Rockwell and A.J. Rock were from the Bronx. Initially, Sir Rockwell, A.J. Rock, Kev Ski and I we all went to Fordham Preparatory School. Then Kev Ski got kicked out of school and then he went to Mount Vernon High School and that's where he met Junie C.  Oh, and there was MC Little Dee. Little Dee was from Mount Vernon as well. He was in and out of the crew."

Kev Ski (The Cheeba Crew/ The Awesome Four)

 

SIR NORIN RAD:"Where did the Cheeba Crew perform at when it was spring or summertime?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"When were doing things outside we would be in the driveway in Mount Vernon up where Little Dee lived, right? So we did that kind of thing. Or we would play in the park in Traphagen in Mount Vernon. There was a park there. When we played in the Bronx during the summertime we played in Edenwald. We played in the park there and we played in the school across the street. I cannot remember the number of it but we did parties back there on the basketball court.  Many different times we played in The Valley. We would go around to a lot of different places and from time to time we would run into the Touch Of Class folks. We knew each other from playing basketball together and then the DJing and MCing became another occasion where we would see each other."

SIR NORIN RAD:"How did the people in Mount Vernon react to your crew when you started playing music over there? Did they already know about that B-Beat Sound or was it totally new to them?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"We had a great reaction from every crowd there and yes, they were already  well familiar with Hiphop in Mount Vernon by the late 1970ies."

November 23rd, 1979: The Cheeba Crew performs at The NAACP in the Bronx along with Touch Of Class

 

SIR NORIN RAD:"What were the differences between playing at a community center like the Edenwald Center and playing at a club like the T-Connection?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"The biggest difference was when you played at places like Edenwald Center it was more raw because they didn't have a soundsystem. You brought your own soundsystem. So the sound was whatever you brought in contrast to the T-Connection that had a major soundsytem. You never brought your stuff to the T-Connection. We just plugged in our turntables. Most people didn't even bring their own turntables. They just brought their records and their needles. So to me the major difference was the sound. We played in many different community centers. We played in the Boys & Girls Club in New Rochelle. That's where we met the Collins Brothers....DJ Mark Cee and his brother. They had this tremendous speaker system!!! They had a wall of speakers! Actually, we wasn't playing that night when we first met the Collins Brothers. They were but we became really good friends and later on we would play together at places like Rod Benders. "

SIR NORIN RAD:"Who was the captain of the Awesome Four MCees?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"I don't think they actually had a captain. The person that would usually start rocking the microphone was Sir Rockwell and then he would pass the mic over to Kev Ski.  Then the rest of the MCees would join in and they would do their routines and all these things that they had going on at that time." 

SIR NORIN RAD:"Did your MCees also do dance steps on stage?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"They did not have choreography because MCing wasn't up to that yet. They definetely had a lot of different routines that they had put together. They would sit down together and work through those. I would back them up with the music. Each routine was based on a specific song. For us...."Got To Be Real" by Cheryl Lynn was our main breakbeat that we used for our shows but we also used such breakbeats as "Johnny The Fox" by Thin Lizzy or "I Can't Stop" by John Davis & The Monster Orchestra and many others. My MCees...they got their own thing going on and eventually they got into storytelling. MCing went from saying some raps in between to being the headliner of the show. At one point in time it wasn't about the DJ anymore. That was a drastic change. I mean people didn't go to Kool DJ Herc because of his MCees. They went there to see Kool Herc. In the beginning you had some MCees to let you know what was going on and to throw in some rhymes here and there. I remember the Soul Sonic Force having a whole bunch of different MCees in the 1970ies that didn't make it to recording "Planet Rock"." 

SIR NORIN RAD:"Please describe the role of each MC within the Awesome Four. Who was in charge of hyping up the crowd? Which MC had the best lyrics and the best delivery? Who was the one that had the girls screaming because of his looks?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"You know something? If you asked each one of them they would all tell you, "Hey, I'm the good looking MC!" The hype person would have been Sir Rockwell.  Kev Ski was more of the smooth looking guy. Kev Ski and A.J. Rock would have been more of the lyricists. At that time the women came to see all of us but most of us were already in a long-term relationship back then. Kev Ski was the one who kept bouncing around."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Could you please elaborate on how much effort went into putting a show together?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"That really depended on the time of the year.....like when things were happening. So if it was during the school year then our practice sessions would probably go to the  weekend. In the summer we would literally practice every day. Some of us had summer jobs and after those summer jobs were over we would come out and we would play ball somewhere and then we got home and started practicing. Those practice sessions could be a couple of hours...especially on the weekend you could do three or four hours of practice. It was work, hard work. You just didn't walk on stage and did your thing. From a group perspective you would make sure that you got together at least once or twice a week.....during the school time....most likely on the weekend." 

SIR NORIN RAD:"For how long did you rock at your parties?"  

DJ KENNY KEN:"At both of them ....clubs and community centers.... we..the Cheeba Crew...would perform for a couple of hours unless we were with somebody. Like when we did the Rod Benders with the Collins Brothers...we would go for an hour and then they would go for an hour. But when we were in the park by ourselves or in the club by ourselves the expectation was  that we would rock the whole party or maybe bring in some folks like Hi-Cee. Then would take turns but otherwise we would play for three or four hours. The same applied to the clubs. So if we would come to a club.....let's say we got there at 10.30 pm....we would perform till 2 am. That's more than three hours." 

March 28th, 1980: The Cheeba Crew performs at the legendary T-Connection in the Bronx

March 29th, 1980: The Cheeba Crew performs at Rod Benders in  Mount Vernon along with the Collins Brothers

SIR NORIN RAD:"What were your favourite breakbeats to cut up back then?" 

DJ KENNY KEN:"You know something....."Apache" (by The Incredible Bongo Band) will always be there. My own personal favourite is "Funky Drummer" (by James Brown) with the count. The thing back then was whether you were able to catch that. I also liked "Down The Avenue" (by Fat Larry's Band) and then of course..... because it was family.....I loved "Take Me To The Mardi Gras" and "Nautilus" by Bob James."  

SIR NORIN RAD:"Alright. How many crates of breakbeats did you have back then? Like at the height of your DJ career?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"(chuckles) I still have some!!! I think we got up to bringing in fifteen crates of beats."

SIR NORIN RAD:"And one crate could hold about eighty records.....forty doubles, right?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"Yeah!!!"

SIR NORIN RAD:"Oh man!!!"

DJ KENNY KEN:"So we're walking into our parties with more than 800 records and out of those 800 records we played only maybe about 30 or 40 beats. But you never know when you wanna go into the bag and pull something out."   

SIR NORIN RAD:"Would you like to shout somebody out at the end of this interview?"

DJ KENNY KEN:"I certainly want to shout out my real good friend MC Hi-Cee linking me up with you and I also want to shout out all the members of the Cheeba Crew. I really appreciate you, Norin Rad."

SIR NORIN RAD:"Thank you! Much love and respect to MC Hi-Cee, my mellow Sureshot La Rock (thanks for all the flyer images), my Intruders Crew, Troy L. Smith and Pluto Seven."