DJ Mathmatiks

Asked where the state of hip-hop is today, Mathmatiks’s answer was not completely surprising given the lack of originality and commercialism that has infected the genre. “I stopped listening to most hip-hop around 1995 because I saw where it was headed, and I really wasn’t interested,” he says. “That’s one of the reasons why I started to study jazz. I didn’t want to spend all of my money on music that I didn’t like.” That year of self-realization and the resulting musical fusion it brought about signaled the eventual rise of one of today’s boldest and most innovative artists. Born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, Matthew A. Stephens, or Mathmatiks, likes to consider himself an industry “triple threat.” Being a producer, DJ and composer, it’s easy to see why his talents allow him to stake such a musical claim. But it’s what lies behind those three titles that has heads turning. Whether it be hip-hop, jazz or classical, Mathmatiks is on the fast track to becoming a lasting fixture on the musical scene. A graduate of Washington, D.C.’s famed Howard University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Jazz Studies and Piano Performance, Mathmatiks is boldly going where no other artist before him has gone. There are few artists that can produce hip-hop tracks during the day, while sitting down at night to play Chopin and Scott Joplin on their keyboards or guitars. Describing his musical leanings, he sums it up as a matter of heavy influences: heavy classical, heavy jazz and heavy hip-hop. To say, however, that revolutionizing hip-hop and raising it to its former level is Mathmatiks’s intent would be only partly right. For him, it’s also about raising consciousness in a generation that he feels has fallen asleep in its pursuit of bling and rock star status. “My audience,” he says, “is people who are self-aware, people who are trying to be part of the solution as opposed to buying into the capitalist idea of everybody for himself.” Matthew A. Stephens grew up with an old family piano in the house. When he received his own personal instrument, a surprise electric guitar from his mother for his thirteenth birthday that he’d coveted for some time, a domino effect was set into motion. It was literally the first instrument that he owned and mastered. Now, his repertoire includes guitar, turntable percussion, bass, drums, and piano. But, figuratively, it was the first instrument on the road to his destiny: a road paved with limitless potential and indefinable revolutionizing sounds for the future of progressive American music. It all adds up to Mathmatiks. ..