DJ Jazzy Jeff talks Hong Kong, getting back with Will Smith, and his vinyl addiction

DJ Jazzy Jeff has played in Hong Kong so many times, he’s practically a local. He’s actually lost count of the number of times he’s spun here (“15 or 16?” he muses).

His most Hong Kong recent performance, on January 14, was at Play in Central, which makes a change, at least; most of his previous shows have been at Dragon-i, including a memorable 2011 gig with Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre. “There were more people watching it in the street than in the club,” he says. “Those guys were like: ‘We’ve come all the way to Hong Kong to perform for 300 people?’”

Born Jeffrey Townes in Philadelphia, Jazzy Jeff is something of a musical polymath. He rose to fame in the late 1980s as one half of big-selling hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, alongside the rapper now better known as film star Will Smith.

He’s an endlessly inventive, endlessly sought-after DJ who still tours remorselessly. At 50 he’s recognised as a pioneer who, alongside the similarly legendary DJ Cash Money, is credited as the inventor of the ante-upping “transformer” scratching technique, and as a respected producer of sounds for successive generations of musical talent, including Jill Scott, The Roots, Eminem, Jewel and Talib Kweli. The latest vocalist for whom he has provided a suitably soulful sonic canvas is lyrically inventive, cerebral Philadelphia MC Dayne Jordan, who was also on his recent Hong Kong trip.

For most people, though, Jazzy Jeff remains best known for his early association with Smith, and for a stream of hit singles including Parents Just Don’t Understand (1988), Summertime (1991) and Boom! Shake the Room (1993), the first two both netting them Grammys. They were catapulted to even greater fame by TV show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; a culture-clash comedy set in Los Angeles that ran from 1990 to 1996, it starred Smith as the title character, kicking off his acting career, with Jeff appearing as his charmless best friend Jazz, whose main role was to be humorously ejected every episode from the family home in which the programme was set.