"DJs today tend to focus on how good they are -- 'Look how fast I can scratch!' They forget they're making music," says turntablist Rob Swift, dressed comfortably in loose olive pants and a black Nike T-shirt. "Miles Davis wouldn't go, 'Look how fast I can play the horn.' He would just play and make you feel something. That's what I want to do with my turntables. Not 'look how good I am,' but 'look how musical I can be with this piece of f---in' steel.'"

Swift, 26, is standing in his bedroom in Queens, New York, where thick, blue wall-to-wall carpeting serves as a buffer between his funky scratching and his less-than-funky downstairs neighbor. A member of the X-ecutioners, the New York-based DJ crew signed to Loud Records, Swift is also the proud father of his first solo album, The Ablist (Asphodel). While most DJ albums are challenging affairs filled to the gills with sound bytes and technique-obsessed scratchers doing their "wicki-wicki-wicki," The Ablist takes a different tack, concentrating on actual songs and collaborations between old friends. Which isn't to say that Swift never finds himself in the mood for a little "wicki-wicki-wicki."

Today, standing before his two Technics SL-1200 turntables and a Vestax Mixer, Swift deftly loosens up with scratching exercises, just like a trumpet player warms up her horn by playing scales. The record spinning is Beats for Jugglers 2, released by X-ecutioner Roc Raida, and the "wicki-wicki" is pulsing out of a beat-up old boombox that once sat atop the shoulder of Swift's older brother back in the Eighties. Before demonstrating the skills in his arsenal, Swift takes time to explain each one. "Beat juggling," he says, "is taking two records and creating new beats from them. I can take the beats from this piece of vinyl and rearrange them in my own way, like a remix."

Swift drops two copies of the same record on his decks. He starts the album on the right spinning. It's a quick funk break, like the beat from James Brown's "Cold Sweat," and it lasts for eight counts. Next, he throws the fader to the left deck, and, using his hands directly on the vinyl, spins the second platter to the same spot, and lets it play for eight beats. Moving from deck to deck, left to right to left again, he cuts the phrase in half, to four counts, then to two. Soon he's playing one count per record, arms a blur above the turntables as he literally juggles the beat.

Abruptly, he allows one record to play for an odd fraction of a phrase, and then juggles that clipped phrase back and forth, swinging with a taut halftime feeling that's not even suggested by the record. If you simply laid these records down on a turntable and let them spin, you'd hear something much faster. Swift is engaging a complex mathematic here, cutting a groove from these records that doesn't actually exist on vinyl. Hips swaying, calves bucking to the beat he's creating, Rob Swift is re-inventing the rhythmic wheel. His fingers are gentle but firm on the wax, and his hand on the fader flutters with the assurance of a piano player plunking bass notes left-handed on a keyboard.

"We're musicians," says Swift, talking about turntablists as a group. "We deal with notes, with bars, with stretchin' time, just like any other musician. It's just that what we do is not conventional."

Swift lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, very near where he grew up. On his apartment's walls hang a Bruce Lee Enter The Dragon poster, his Bachelor's Degree from Baruch College and a huge world map with pins marking every city and country where his DJ skills have taken him. He learned those skills at home. "My dad had a hobby of DJing, and when he would go off to work on holidays, my older brother would invite his friends over and they'd use my dad's equipment," he remembers. "I'd just sit down and watch. Watch my brother DJ. Watch his friends rhyme. When I was twelve, I asked my brother to teach me."

Turntablists are among the most history-conscious of hip-hop artists, and Swift is no different. He regularly refers to DJ forefathers Grand Master Flash, Grandwizard Theodore and Grandmixer DXT, and he credits his brother Uni for teaching him to cut and instilling "a library of records in [his] mind. I can search through the data in my mind and think, 'Yo, that record would be dope for this song I wanna produce.' But a lot of young DJs comin' up now weren't exposed to all those old records."

While he was developing his skills at home, he was testing them with his friends in junior high school. Their group was called SOD, or Sounds of Destruction. It included Swift, a young producer named Les (now of the Beatnuts), producer Sy/Nare (who plays keyboards on The Ablist) and an MC called Gangis Kahn (who raps on The Ablist). "We used to go over Les' house and make demo tapes with his little Casio sampler. We'd mail them to labels, trying to get a record deal." Three of the four SODs now work as musicians, while Gangis Kahn has landed in prison. But that didn't stop Swift from including him in his good fortune.

"When I was workin' on the album, he called me from jail. I'm like, 'Yo, why don't you call me tomorrow at the studio. I'm gonna mic the phone, so just kick a verse and I'll put it on my album,'" he says. The resulting song, simply titled "Gangis Kahn," is totally stripped down, words without beats, "coming to you live from muhfucking federal custody, trapped behind barbed wire." With all the true crime storytelling and gangsta posturing in hip-hop, this song stands out as painfully honest and glamour-free. "He's a good friend of mine and we never got to fulfill our dream to make a song together," says Swift. "This was the closest that we could come."

At his apartment, Swift continues his turntable demonstration, showing how DJs stick strips of tape to their records like the hands of a clock. The markings guide the turntablist to the bits of music they need. "I use it like a watch," he explains. "The 'get down' is between one and three o'clock. The 'bu-damp!' is between five and seven." Swift lets the platter spin, producing "Get down!" each time the slab of tape passes from one to three o'clock on the imaginary clock face. "Every time I put the record on," he says, "I know exactly how to approach it." By pushing the wax backwards in sync with his other hand on the fader a few times, Rob Swift speaks the universal language of hip-hop: "Get down! G-g-get, Get down!"

"To me, turntables are like drums. They even have a round shape and two sticks -- the needle arms. It's bugged out. It reminds me of drums a lot."

RODD McLEOD
(May 6, 1999)