DJ Monkey

Although the moniker DJ Monkey might suggest an individual act rooted in hip-hop or electronic club scenes, the entity is in fact a full ensemble no different in structure from Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jethro Tull, Jesus Jones or Janet Vodka. Its sound draws simultaneously from alternative rock, funk, soul, jazz, hip-hop, spoken word and beat poetry, rendering any single stylistic label inadequate. The Los Angeles collective has absorbed the legacies of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, Gil Scott-Heron, David Bowie, James Brown and Chic’s Nile Rodgers, as well as the experimental rap approaches of De La Soul, Q-Tip, A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets. Rather than embracing the more aggressive, gangsta-oriented strain of hip-hop, DJ Monkey treats rap as a continuation of earlier beatnik and countercultural traditions. Co-founder Joey Alkes, born in New York, NY on 29 June 1946, has observed that the emergence of hip-hop in the late 1970s and early 1980s struck him as a direct extension of the jazz explorations undertaken by beat poets in the late 1950s.

The group itself was assembled in Los Angeles in 2002 by multi-instrumentalist and producer Mick McMains, whose credits include work with Earl Slick, and by veteran songwriter and vocalist Alkes, whose compositions have been interpreted by the Plimsouls, Phil Seymour and the Roadrunners; Alkes co-authored the Plimsouls’ hit single “Million Miles Away,” featured in the 1982 film Valley Girl. Alkes has also served as a music journalist and manager, overseeing the careers of They Eat Their Own, the Los Angeles shock-rock outfit Haunted Garage and the Atlanta-based soul-infused hard-rock ensemble Mother’s Finest. Additional contributors have included guitarist Ian McMains, Mick McMains’ son, rapper Lil’ TipToe, hip-hop deejay MR1 and saxophonist/flutist Mitch Rafal, known professionally as Count Daddy-O and not to be mistaken for Stetsasonic’s Daddy-O. Rafal previously performed with the cult-favored Space Shot Orchestra of the 1980s and accompanied Latino rapper Kid Frost; both Alkes and Rafal had been members of that same group, with Alkes co-writing its signature piece “The Sphinx.” The band’s first recording, the independently issued Another Evolution, appeared on Alkes’ own Airborne Monkey Records imprint in 2003.