Grandmaster Flash March 20, 2008

Oldschool Hip Hop: Joseph "Biggie Grand" Saddler (born January 1, 1958 in Bridgetown, Barbados), better known as Grandmaster Flash, is an American hip hop musician and DJ; one of the pioneers of hip-hop DJing, cutting, and mixing. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, becoming the first hip hop/rap artists so honored.
Saddler's family immigrated to the United States, and he grew up in the Bronx. He currently lives in the Morrisania section of the South Bronx. He became involved in the earliest New York DJ scene, attending parties set up by early luminaries. Learning from Pete Jones and Kool Herc, he used duplicate copies of a single record and two turntables (for cutting) but added a dexterous manual edit with a mixer to promote the break (the ordinary playing of the record would be interrupted to overlay the break, the break could be repeated by using the mixer to switch channels while the second record was spun back). He also invented the technique initially called cutting, which was developed by Grand Wizard Theodore into scratching (AMG).
Grandmaster Flash's parents played an important role in his interest in music. His parents hailed from Barbados and his father was a big fan of Caribbean and black American records. As a kid Flash was fascinated by his father's record collection, "My father was a very heavy record collector. He still thinks that he has the stronger collection. I used to open his closets and just watch all the records he had. I used to get into trouble for touching his records, but I'd go right back and bother them." Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal's book That's the Joint describes how Flash's entry into "cutting" came from this fascination with his father's record collection as well as his mother's desire for him to educate himself in electronics.

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