Eligh

Eligh, an inventive MC and beatmaker, helped shape California's underground hip-hop scene in the mid- and late 1990s through his work with the Living Legends crew. Across ten years the collective issued more than a dozen projects, beginning with UHB I in 1996 and ending with Legendary Music, Vol. 2 in 2008. At the same time he pursued a parallel solo trajectory that began with As They Pass and reached into the 2010s with Last House on the Block in 2018.

Born Eligh Nachowitz in Los Angeles, he first felt drawn to hip-hop after encountering the 1980s film Beat Street and the LL Cool J single "I'm Bad." In high school he formed a duo called the Boogalu Badboys with MC Scarub, yet the addition of Murs soon turned the group into 3 Melancholy Gypsys, or 3MG. Evicted from his aunt and uncle's residence, he relocated from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, where he met the Grouch and the connection ultimately folded 3MG into the Living Legends.

Merging tireless productivity with the crew's independent ethos, Eligh completed nearly a dozen LPs in a decade while also supplying beats, sometimes under the Gandalf alias, to acts outside the collective such as Company Flow, Pigeon John, and wrestler John Cena. Self-released efforts like As They Pass in 1996 and Gas Dream in 1999 marked the late 1990s, while the 2000s brought denser, more enigmatic albums such as Poltergeist in 2003 and Enigma in 2005.

Alongside further 3MG recordings, he contributed to Living Legends side projects including the Righteous Brothers Project and G&E with the Grouch. In 2009 he issued the collaborative On Sacred Ground with his mother Jo Wilkinson, then partnered with Amp Live for Therapy at 3 in 2011. Empire Distribution released 80 HRTZ in 2015, and the project was backed by shows across the United States and Europe.

He returned in 2018 with his nineteenth solo album, Last House on the Block, which featured appearances by Evidence, the Grouch, Zion I, Eamon, and others.