After the COVID-19 pandemic brought a screeching halt to their gigs in clubs and other party venues, deejays like Guyana-born Gerald ‘Jerry’ Aaron have found new audiences and communities through online streaming.
“Covid-19 was devastating to the entertainment industry. We were the first to be locked down and the last to return. Everything that the entertainment industry stands for is what the virus thrives on. Groups of people in small or large spaces, people laughing and talking and sharing the same air. People drinking, dancing, hugging, cavorting and having a good time. All the venues are closed. No gatherings at parties, weddings, birthdays, even funerals,” Aaron told Stabroek Weekend.
Aaron, of Brampton, Ontario, migrated to Canada in 1976 and is the chief executive officer and chief operations officer of his entertainment company, GrooveU Productions, which he formed after working with the Toronto Sun as a circulation district manager for 21 years. He is a computer science graduate from De Vry Institute of Technology.
In an interview from Toronto, Aaron, also known as Jerrythedj, said that in high school he made extra money by making cassettes and selling them to fellow students.
While working at the Toronto Sun, he said, “I was playing music and getting more involved in deejaying. People started hiring me for different events. I was happy to play. They kept paying me and I kept going. It got so big that eventually I resigned from the Toronto Sun and started my own disc jockey company, GrooveU Productions. Deejaying was a hobby that became a business.”
GrooveU Productions has the exclusive contracts to provide musical services to two of Toronto’s large tour boat companies, the Great Lakes Schooner Company and Yankee Lady Yacht Charters. The two companies operate five boats of varying sizes with capacities ranging from 72 passengers to 300. “It is primarily an April to October type industry in Toronto Harbour.” The boats host corporate events, weddings, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, graduations, engagement parties and functions that would involve food, music and partying on Lake Ontario.
“My company supplies the deejays to all these boats throughout the summer. Each cruise is about four hours long. Between the two companies I will get about 650 and 750 cruises each summer. Sometimes all five boats go out three times a day, seven days a week until summer ends. It’s a lot of fun. I have nine deejays who work for me in four hour slots throughout the summer. We rotate from boat to boat. Throughout the summer I would use about 20 standby-deejays who are independent contractors. I did this each year for 11 years. In 2020, with the pandemic there was no cruise.”
In July 2021, the lockdown was relaxed a bit and boats were allowed to run at 50 per cent capacity with masking, social distancing and initially no dancing.
“I started in July and ended in September. I did four cruises a week. There just was not enough business to go around. Only three or four times I used other deejays to cover the boats because there were no corporate events, just dinner and dance.”
With the lockdowns, a deejay friend, ‘Djstartingfrom-scratch’, one of Canada’s top deejays, introduced Aaron to Twitch via a text message in March 2020 saying he was on Twitch and invited others to follow him and to sign up. Aaron started to read about Twitch and checked on other deejays. Twitch, owned by Amazon, is an interactive, livestreaming service for content spanning gaming, entertainment, sports and music.
Aaron signed up in May 2020 under the Twitch handle, Jerrythedj.
“I started to play on Twitch because my granddaughter, who was five years at the time, lives with her family an hour away from me and with COVID, I couldn’t visit. She would call and ask me to play music for her. I had a list of her songs that included Drake, Black Eyed Peas, Taylor Swift and I played for her every Tuesday.” He now streams on Twitch three times a week.
Eventually he informed other people that he was playing on Twitch. Designing different background scenes got him excited. “The interactions really got me going on Twitch. It is great.”
About a month and a half after being on Twitch, he had about 50 followers.
“One night, looking at a chat, I asked people to let me know where they were checking in from and it was from around the world. People start following you and you follow people. You get to know certain deejays and followers and you become family. You create a community. Pre-COVID, Aaron also covered La Maquette, a French restaurant in Toronto which caters for weddings. “I was their go to vendor for 26 years.” He also played every Friday for The Crooked Cue, a chain of restaurants with sports bars, and at several night clubs. “Anything that involved people wanting a deejay, my company provided the entertainment.”
During the pandemic he had no interest outside of music. “I wasn’t depressed. Just bored. When Caribanna weekend came around I was sitting on the deck with nothing to do and no place to go. I went from a pace of 90 miles an hour to an abrupt stop.”
Aaron credits his mother, a music lover with a collection of albums, for being his inspiration in becoming a deejay. “Growing up in Guyana, everything was soul, funk and oldies.” Nevertheless, he has added many genres of music to his repertoire including reggae, dancehall, soca and Afrobeats. In the line of duty, Aaron has played to many celebrities including local and foreign politicians, business magnates, actors and actresses, singers and musicians, and athletes among others. He can be followed at https://www.twitch.tv/jerrythedj
DjP-Fu
Unlike Aaron, for Richard ‘P_fu’ Mosha, playing music is a hobby. Tanzania-born Mosha, of Jefferson City, Missouri, is employed fulltime as a database administrator and works from home.
Speaking from Missouri, Mosha said he loved playing all genres of music in high school in Arusha, Tanzania, where he was born. When he arrived in Columbia, Missouri, where he studied, there were no African deejays and not many Africans but he played at house parties. However, Columbia is a college town with international students and a friend convinced him to play at least once a month in a club.
“I started playing publicly in October 2019 and when everything was looking up, the pandemic started and so began the lockdowns. Then I played music for myself.”
In March 2020, a friend advised him to join Facebook, where Tanzanians were looking for people who were deejaying to fill up slots on ‘raid trains’.
“We created a group called Bongo DJs.” Bongo, the Swahili word for brain, is a nickname for Tanzanians. They played until October 2020 when Facebook disallowed deejaying and someone suggested playing on Twitch.
“I started playing on Twitch on October 3rd, 2020 and I just love it. On Twitch I meet a lot of people but it is still hard for us who lost a lot of people in transition from Facebook to Twitch. Nobody knows Twitch.”
On Twitch, Mosha was forced to become an emcee while deejaying. “When people come on your channel, you have to talk to them. Before that I never liked to talk. I played my music and that was it.”
At their start-up on Twitch, the Bongo DJs played music for Tanzanians and East Africans. “In January 2021, I started going around to other deejays on Twitch and to explore music and an audience outside of East Africa. That was how I met Jerry and other deejays.”
Mosha now has a mixed audience and plays different genres for different audiences. He hosts four shows playing , hip hop, R&B and soul, and ‘Afro Vibes’ featuring Afrobeats and Zouks that reach Americans, Africans, and West Indians among others. On Sundays he dedicates an hour of gospel music in English and Swahili. “I try to accommodate all people. The more I play I know who will come and when.”
When things return to normal, Mosha does not see himself giving up on Twitch. “It will be hard to run away from new friends I have made and a community I have built. When we can travel, my friend, deejay, ThaFunkhouse and l will visit Jerry. We have gone beyond chatting. We help each other and exchange ideas in getting things done on the channels. We are learning from each other.”
Mosha got his name DjP_Fu from the hip hop group Fu-Schnickens. His nickname at home was P and he added the Fu. Mosha’s channel can be found at: https://www.twitch.tv/djp_fu
DJKuTemClosE
Another part-time deejay who has found an audience on Twitch is Rick ‘KuTemClosE’ Amos, a veteran US marine who runs his own barbering studio. He started deejaying as a teenager while working at a fast food restaurant playing hip hop music and rhythm and blues (R&B). “Now, when I’m not deejaying I am cutting hair,” he said.
Amos, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, played music at the military club, Coconut Alley at Naval Air Station, Keflavik, Iceland. “I had three jobs when I was stationed in Iceland. I had my full time job in the military. I was doing part time barbering and I was deejaying at the club. I had a tremendous time. I would have stayed longer but when I requested an extension it was denied and I was sent back to the US.”
Speaking from Virginia Beach, Amos got into deejaying as a teenager in the mid-1980s and has been around the entertainment industry for some 30 years.
“I didn’t work at any clubs when I started because I was a teenager at the time. Prior to joining the military in 1988, I didn’t deejay for seven years.”
Before he started playing on Twitch, he had signed up on an online livestreaming platform Periscope but it shut down in March 2020.
“I knew about Twitch but didn’t know deejays were livestreaming on Twitch. I looked into it and didn’t like it at first and I was constantly making comparisons between the two platforms but I had no choice. I went kicking and screaming with Twitch, trying to familiarize myself with it, to grow my viewers. I am still learning how to grow the Twitch community.”
According to Amos, deejays on Twitch are now using the ‘Raid Trains’ to help each streamer grow and gain exposure to other viewers who may not get a chance to see them. Once they like a deejay, viewers tend to stick with that deejay. It is a huge network and deejays use the raid trains to introduce other deejays across Twitch and to introduce some new deejays not known to Twitch.
“When one deejay finishes a session he takes his audience to another deejay. “It has been very successful. Lots of people are going on Twitch because of Jerry’s fun catch phrase ‘Check! Check!’ now trending on Twitch.”
Amos’ brand on Twitch, Crate Nation, is his community of deejays and viewers who were on Periscope where he was trying to unite people of similar backgrounds. His preferred genres of music include R&B, hip hop, jazz, slow jams and a little bit of reggae. “I’m old school. I love house music, pop music. I’m still trying to learn some other musical genres. I listen to a lot of Jerry’s, ThaFunkHouse and P-fu. I don’t know much about the Bongos DJs or the Afrobeats but having been introduced, I am enjoying them.”
Speaking of reggae, he said one of his favourite groups is Steel Pulse. “Reggae has a different beat to what you are used to hearing in the US. It is a cool, calming, soothing beat. Every reggae is different. I also love the challenge of trying to understand what they are saying. One day, when I was in the military we were singing a reggae in the office. One of my superiors who was from Jamaica looked at us and asked ‘Do you know what they are saying?’. We didn’t know. He started laughing and said, ‘You might want to look into that’.”
How did he come by the name DJKuTemClosE? Amos said, a deejay on a local show in Iceland gave him the name Djkutemup because he also worked at a barbershop and he modified the name to suit himself.
Pre-COVID-19 he was deejaying at local gigs, high school reunions, weddings, sports bar venues, house parties. “Nothing big. Although I was deejaying, I wasn’t deejaying a lot because of barbering. Once the pandemic hit, I made the best use of time. Now I stream six times a week or with raid trains and other events on Twitch.” Amos is at https://www.twitch.tv/djkutemclose
From localized audiences, Aaron, Mosha and Amos now reach people in many countries including Guyana, Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Thailand, Sweden, England, France, Canada, USA, Japan, Germany, Argentina, Australia, Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Grenada among others.
