Brooklyn Dawn
When Brooklyn Dawn moved to New York City in 2005, she had one idea in mind.
“I stood behind my turntables for eight hours a day, every single day, for over a year getting the basics of everything down,” says the hip-hop deejay. “I taught myself how to mix better, scratch better and master Serato. I wouldn’t leave my apartment for two weeks at a clip.”
That’s Brooklyn Dawn in a nutshell. We’ve all seen the deejays who are clearly only there for the payday. You know the type: the ones who scan Billboard each week for the top singles, know enough mixing to get by and make a nice living on who they know, not how they perform. With Brooklyn Dawn, an early fondness for music became an obsession with deejaying and her devotion to her craft has led her to where she is today: numerous NYC residencies, spots on MTV shows (Skate Life, following the life of skater JZ Radical) and production work with such noted emcees as Jim Jones and Jeru the Damaja.
But before all that, there was Brooke (last name here), the college student/record obsessive, putting together Slippery Grooves, a homemade 12-disc set of mixes casually handed out to family and friends. Sure, we’ve all made mixes before, but most of us never got props from countless strangers. “In junior year, I started getting calls from people at random colleges asking for more mixes,” says Dawn. “I hadn’t even been to some of the schools, but people started passing them around more and more.”
Her keen ear and deft sequencing led Dawn to deejaying and on her first gig—armed with only a few CDJs and a cheap mixer—she found her new career. “I really subscribe to the belief that you live in the moment and that is what happiness is all about,” waxes the deejay. “Up until that moment I deejayed, I never really found anything that made me feel so there. All that energy felt so right and enlightening and it was like, if I could find a way to take this feeling and make it a career, why not do it?”
Soon enough, Dawn would be on a weekly train from Boston to New York to check out the city’s best deejays. At the now-defunct Table 50, Dawn would save up all her cash to buy a table, hoping to get in good with the owner so he’d give her the chance to spin. It worked. After moving to New York, the deejay simultaneously practiced her Shaolin monk-level discipline of turntable study by day while establishing a number of weekly residencies at night, including Table 50 and Plan B.
While she currently holds it down at New York spots Greenhouse, GoldBar, Gallery Bar, and Ella, Dawn has added producer to her ever-expanding resume, working with G. Love, Juju (The Beatnuts), Jeru the Damaja and Jim Jones. For the latter, a meeting brokered by Damon Dash saw Dawn drop 14 beats on the rapper for potential use. He bought them all.