Grammy award-winner, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and all-round hip-hop legend DJ Grandmaster Flash will be playing London’s Brooklyn Bowl on the 29th July 2015.
Grandmaster Flash hits the Bowl fresh from his appearance at Glastonbury where he joined Mark Ronson on stage to perform ’Uptown Funk’ alongside George Clinton and Mary J. Blige .
In the world’s of hip-hop and dance music, the innovation and influence of Grandmaster Flash in undeniable. His pioneering mixing skills transformed the turntable into true ‘instrument,’ and his ability to get a crowd moving has made his DJ sets legendary.
Flash was primary architect of hip-hop and remains one of the music culture’s most revered music icons. Ever since the seminal days of block parties in the Bronx, Grandmaster Flash has been an ambassador for hip-hop - whether with the original Furious Five rap crew, pioneering mixing and scratching, or just rocking parties around the world.
In the 1970s Grandmaster Flash pioneered the art of break-beat DJing—the process of remixing and thereby creating a new piece of music by playing vinyl records and turntables as musical instruments. Disco-era DJs spun records so that people could dance. The original turntablist, Flash took it a step further by cutting, rubbing, backspinning, and mixing records, focusing on “breaks”—what Flash described as “the short, climactic parts of the records that really grabbed me”—as a way of heightening musical excitement and creating something new.
During hip-hop’s nearly 40-year history, few names have become as well known to music lovers across the globe as that of Grandmaster Flash. Not only is he responsible for inventing the musical genre called hip-hop and a worldwide musical culture, but his pioneering use of the turntables make him the first DJ to play the turntables as a musical instrument thus helping to elevate the status of the DJ to a masterful, artistic position.
He is responsible for assembling one of the earliest and greatest rap groups of all time Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five – these are some of the hallmarks of a career which has extended from the Bronx in the early 1970s to all corners of the globe into the 21st century. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five fomented the musical revolution known as hip-hop. Theirs was a groundbreaking union between one DJ and five rapping MCs. One of the first hip-hop posses, they were responsible for such masterpieces as “The Message” and “Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.”
