Ant Banks

Hailing from the Bay Area, producer Ant Banks launched his career assisting local legend Too Short in an uncredited capacity. His initial credits arrived on the 1992 hip-hop soundtracks Juice and Menace II Society. The same year he handled production for Too Short’s Shorty the Pimp along with Spice 1 and Pooh-Man. Those relationships led to a Jive Records deal and the 1993 release of his debut album Sittin' on Something Phat, which incorporated live instrumentation highlighted by guitar work from former Parliament mainstay Michael Hampton. The Big Badass and Do or Die arrived in 1994 and 1995, respectively, revealing Banks’s skills both on the microphone and at the mixing board. For 1997’s Big Thangs he instead assembled a roster of leading West Coast rappers that included Ice Cube, 2Pac, Too Short, and Ice-T; the approach succeeded when the album reached the Top 20. April 1999 saw the launch of his T.W.D.Y. project, which scored a substantial hit with the track “Players Holiday.” Slightly more than twelve months afterward came the second T.W.D.Y. album, Lead the Way.