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Friday, November 09, 2001

By Scott Mervis, Weekend Editor, Post-Gazette

DJ Logic is boldly going where few DJs have gone before: to the front of the band.

He's a logical choice for a turntable frontman having spent years on the fringes mixing it up with rock bands, hip-hop acts and some of America's heaviest jazz players.

His outfit is Project Logic, a jazz-funk band from New York that rocks the house with a bitches' brew of jungle, trip-hop and drum 'n bass grooves.

	PROJECT LOGIC AND DJ LOGIC WHERE: Club Laga, Oakland. WHEN: Tonight at 7:30. TICKETS: $16; 412-323-1919.

It all started with his mom buying him a pair of turntables for Christmas 1985. The diversity training, he got on the streets.

"Growing up in the '80s in the Bronx, I was getting turned on to hip hop as well as playing with live musicians," Logic says. "I had a drummer friend living next door to me who had an alternative rock band. I was 14 years old. I was hearing a lot of new things and exploring a lot. I grasped both things at the same time. I would spin sets in my neighborhood and then go Downtown and do jazz gigs with jazz musicians and play with [an] alternative rock band."

The rock band was Eye and I, a member of the so-called Black Rock Coalition of the early '90s led by Living Color. Vernon Reid, Living Color's mind-blowing guitarist, introduced Logic to the jazz scene and a side band of his called My Science Project. He once said that "Logic had a tone, a sound and a style of his own. He became a musician first and a DJ second." By 1996, Logic was in good standing at the Knitting Factory, jamming with the likes of Don Byron and becoming the "unofficial fourth member" of avant-garde titans Medeski, Martin and Wood.

Feeling more comfortable with the mechanics of a band, Logic opted to form his own, Project Logic, in 1999. At a lot of his gigs, like the one tonight at Club Laga, he doubles up, fronting the band and going it alone with the turntables.

"When I go out myself, I just get the right records and blend together," Logic says. "With musicians, I have to really pay attention to what's going on around me, kind of work a little harder to blend the sounds going on from each instrument. I look at the musicians as a third turntable. I get records to manipulate with effects, scratch stuff and add percussion and colors on top of the groove."

The Project's second and latest effort, "The Anomaly," is an exuberant and endlessly funky jazz-electronica session featuring the five-piece band, plus Reid, Medeski and some other hot guest players who add warmth, raps and an occasional Middle Eastern flavor to the grooves.

In reproducing the music live, he keeps the structure loose for the "third turntable" to jam.

"You don't want to do the live set just like the record," he says. "You want to change it up, and plus you want the musicians to play freely. I don't want them to be all tight. I want them to be open and change the form, like a remix. You also vibe off the audience a bit, if everybody's vibin' off the one groove, you probably stick with it a little longer."

This summer, Logic found himself in another place where DJs aren't likely to be found: playing to the Grateful Dead crowd on the So Many Roads tour with Ratdog, Rusted Root, Karl Denson and Keller Williams.

"The Grateful Dead crowd hasn't seen someone spin with Grateful Dead members. That was something different," he says. "I have Grateful Dead records and I love some of the grooves and the way they blend and segue certain songs behind each other. That's how I was when I played with them. They would play and [Ratdog leader] Bob Weir would step off and me and [drummer Jay Lane] would go into something and people would be like 'What? Where's that coming from?' And then they'd shine a spotlight on me and it was like, 'What? A DJ?' It turned out great. Bob Weir told me 'I didn't know that this hip-hop thing was going to work out, but it sounded great. This tour was one of the best tours.' "

Logic has been in hot demand in the past year, recording and performing with guys like John Scofield, Joshua Redman, Mark Ribot, Bela Fleck and Chris Whitley. The DJ isn't even able to handle all the offers coming in.

"I just try to take it one step at a time and not overdo it," he says. "I love people wanting to work with me. I just want to be able to do it right. Bring something fresh to the table for each person I work with."

One place you won't find DJ Logic is in the mainstream hip-hop scene.

"I like the underground stuff, but the commercial stuff has changed," he says. "Back in the day, when I was growing up, it was more positive. Rappers were making statements politically, like Public Enemy and KRS-ONE, people were making sense of it. It was all fun. You had the breakdancing at the time. It was cool. Now, everybody is just talking this and talking that, same old same old."