Tayo’s got a new bottom end
Words Sam Lewis
DJ Tayo’s latest single, ‘Style and Trend’, mixes up dancehall, grime and bitsy, pounding bass in a manner that would make Toddla T proud. Indeed, it’s all a long way from his days as a founding figure in the burgeoning breakbeat movement of the late nineties. “When I started, you could just be a DJ without it being essential to make music,” he explains. “Now anyone with a big single can go out and play a load of gigs.”
Although it was with breakbeat that Tayo made his name, in recent years he’s distanced himself from the scene. “I’m not a massive fan of it at the moment, but I think the music has moved on in a direction that doesn’t suit me,” he continues. “It’s still popular and I appreciate that it’s what I made my name playing, but I have always leaned towards a grittier, bass-inflected sound. I find more of what I’m looking for in other genres.”
Those other genres include bassline (“I love the energy of it”) and, particularly, dubstep. For Tayo, both are just the most recent incarnations of a British bass scene that’s been going for decades now. “Bassline and dubstep are just carrying on the tradition of British ‘urban’ music, in the proper sense of the word, like drum’n’bass and garage before.”
It’s a culture that Soul Jazz have been at the forefront of documenting, so just how did the collaboration between the two come about? “I worked there when I was in my last year at university. They are honest people with a good work ethic, who are simultaneously forward-thinking and very traditional at the same time.”
Tayo was also recently sighted at Fabric DJing alongside Drop The Lime and Buraka Som Sistema. “It’s all linked for me by beats and bass,” he says. “If the pool is getting wider, then more interesting music will get thrown up. It’s all good.”
