The Club of Violent Poets, in a promotional photograph, with Jota Mayúscula on the right.
The first time I interviewed Jota Mayúscula was in 1997. CPV, formerly El Club de los Poetas Violentos, was about to release their second album,
La saga Continua 24/7
, and despite my insistence on emphasizing the pioneering and referential character of the group and its debut,
Madrid Zona Bruta
, the Madrid DJ and producer preferred to reduce its importance and distribute merits.
“By coincidences of life we were the first band to publish a
real hip-hop album,
not manipulated.
We had to do it and that's it.
There were already people before our appearance, the difference is that we were lucky enough to be able to record ”, he explained.
It was an elegant way of showing respect and honoring the anonymous pioneers of the scene, but Jota Mayúscula was very clear that the start of the formation was a turning point in the Spanish musical chronicle:
hip-hop
fans
no longer they were alone, finally a group from the national level was able to approach the genre with seriousness, talent, knowledge of the cause and well-assimilated references.
Jota Mayúscula, pillar of rap and hip-hop in Spain, dies at 48
DJ skilled, insightful producer and close popularizer, Jota Uppercase was one of the sound architects of the Golden Age of the
hip-hop
Spanish, with a bet that started in the
boom bap
New York nineties and fed on numerous outside influences to the
hip- hop
, from jazz or funk to Latin rhythms, as his creative gaze expanded.
He was decisive because he was one of the first, but also because he was one of the best and one of the most restless.
In tune with many producers of the nineties, Jota Mayúscula diversified its activity beyond CPV and normalized a very widespread practice in the United States: the interest in producing new promises, from Violadores del Verso to SFDK, and artists of another profile, such as Mala Rodríguez or Ari, or the unconditional support of the solo projects of the members of their own group.
The release in 2000 of
Hombre soltero searches,
the first of his four solo albums, was another movement imported from the cradle of
hip-hop
, where it is common for producers to publish albums with collaborations of the cream of rappers of the moment , which would give our scene packaging and naturalness.
Jota Mayúscula showed that in
Spanish
hip-hop
the producer could also be the star and the center of attention.
More focused on his journalistic and communicative work at the head of
El rimadero –Radio
3 program co-presented with Frank T. in which he was once again a pioneer in spreading
hip-hop
culture
from a public medium– than in his facet musical, who knows if aware that the new generations are going by another path, in the last decade Jota Mayúscula gradually moved away from the record circuit, but like all great music lovers and creators he continued to preserve his smell and taste for new sounds and voices emerging.