Jasmine Solano

In today’s social media driven world, celebrity is often defined less by what you’ve done and more by how you looked doing it — how many hits did you get after you shared it? Warhol’s fifteen minutes has been replaced by Instagram’s fifteen seconds.

Despite that challenge, DJ Jasmine Solano has managed to stay relevant while staying true to her roots. Whether she is spinning disks in Brooklyn, promoting women’s rights in Los Angeles, or hosting an MTV show in Paris, Solano is always keeping it real.

If her only claim to fame was being one of the first successful female East Coast DJs, Solano would already have made her mark. But by the end of the decade, she was touring the country with Wiz Khalifa and DJing events for the Red Bull Music Academy. A few years later, she was hosting a cable show for MTV Iggy called “Scratch the Surface.” Each episode featured Solano visiting a different international city in which she’d absorb and share the music culture found there in the city’s streets and clubs. It revealed a multi-cultural awareness that has been a part of her music and social activism ever since.

Around that same time, she partnered with MeLo-X to form Electric Punanny. Their jams were a mash-up of electro-funk, dancehall, and reggae. The sound clicked, and a 2014 tour included a headline set at the world-famous Glastonbury Festival, a stage far bigger than the ones she used to play as a kid back on the streets of Philly.

“The recent passing of Aretha Franklin has made me nostalgic about how music came into my life,” Solano says. “Aretha was responsible for shaping my ear, so much so that I can’t listen to music if it doesn’t have some type of soul.”

Solano grew up listening to her parent’s Motown and R&B records. It wasn’t long before she discovered the beats and breaks coming from the street. By the time she reached junior high school, she was dancing, reading poetry at open-mic events, and becoming politically aware of the world around her.

“Even at the age of 5, I started realizing my deep attraction and magnetism to music. By the time I was fifteen, I was in a breakdancing club, and I was doing hip-hop dance. A friend of mine ran the hip-hop section at this local music store. He first showed me his turntables and was scratching on them,” she recalls. “In that moment, I realized this is the instrument I want to play. This makes sense to me. This speaks to me. This is everything. It was like finding gold in a mine. It was such a deep and intense realization for me and I remember saying, ‘Oh my God, if I could ever be a DJ, I would be the coolest person in the world.’”

Solano went to Emerson College in Boston, creating her own degree, which was a unique combination of music production, marketing, and politics. While in school, she scored a job DJing at a local radio station. It was a gig that led to her being named “Best Female Radio Personality” at the 2006 New England Urban Music Awards. But it was a less glamorous job that led her out of the radio booth and into the clubs.

“I was working as a coat check girl at a club while I was in school. I worked for a whole winter and saved up enough money to buy turntables from my friend at the record store. I still have those tables and they mean a lot to me,” she explains. “This is mid 2000s and there was this DJ who was so sweet. I told him I was learning to DJ and he allowed me to practice in the club before anyone arrived. I would have a practice session before most of my coat check shifts.”

But according to Solano, it wasn’t until she moved to New York City around 2007 that she started “DJing the clubs for real.” She recalls “I would DJ anywhere for $50 bucks, for anyone that would let me get on. Even with three people in the room, I would still be so nervous. I laugh at those days now, because it’s just those growing pains of starting out in a craft.”

When Solano broke through, New York was still a city in transition. Rudolph Giuliani was out and Mayor Mike Bloomberg was in. The music scene was changing and hip-hop was becoming the dominant style of music in the country, but a female DJ was still an anomaly in a male-dominated culture. Solano helped change that perception. In 2017, she founded the Unity in Color movement, assembling groups of women from around the world for photographs to represent unity and diversity. Today, she’s excited for change.

“It’s definitely an era that I’m happy to be alive in because it’s long overdue. We’re celebrating the possibility of what’s to come, which is equality,” Solano proclaims. “Everyone deserves a seat at the table, and if there isn’t a seat, women will create their own table. So many more women now are becoming DJs, not just because the technology makes it accessible, but because they’re making space for themselves.”

Despite the possibilities technology allows, it’s not all just a piece of cake, according to Solano. “You can get all the technical aspects perfected at home and be killing it in your living room, and then the moment you’re in front of people who are not giving you any slack, they expect you to be perfect, they expect you to give them what they want. That’s a whole different type of pressure,” she asserts.

“Whenever someone asks me to show them how to DJ, I make them do two things. One, watch the movie Scratch, a documentary from 2002; and second, read this book How To DJ Right, which is similar to a How to DJ for Dummies book. It goes over all the basics you need to know.”

Solano references DJs Amira and Kayla who are young twin girl DJs who have been taught by their father. “I would tell young women, take a look at them and read their stories and see how many years they’ve been practicing to get that good.”

For Solano, there are new projects ahead. She has a new podcast with Spotify called Ebb & Flow, that features interviews with a variety of hip-hop and R&B artists. The show takes her in yet another direction, and gives her a chance to share her knowledge of DJing and its history. The title is close to her heart.

“The phrase is something I’m really trying to live by these days, which is a reference to the sea. Just like with the waves and the tide, things are going to come and go and there’s going to be cycles. Everything is temporary,” she says. “As a musician, your worth is constantly being measured, rejected, accepted, celebrated, dismissed, or ignored. It takes confidence to hold on to your worth if something doesn’t result in the way you want it to. I guess it’s really about being open and flexible and allowing life to take you where it’s going to take you. To me it’s all about the connection of humanity, if we’re really going to take it there.”

She adds “There’s a feelin’ in a room with people who are vibrating on the same frequency: when they’re there to spread love, to experience joy through music, and have fun. You don’t need to know each other, you don’t need to speak the same language. That type of interaction is very addictive to me. To influence and create that type of human interaction is what I love.”

— Written by Patrick Quinn
— 120 film photography by Adam Hutsell
— Installation and headpiece by Farida Amar and Andru Perez
— Hair by Brandy Rice
— Makeup by Jill Fogel
— Styling by Milana Burdette
— Creative Direction by Farida Amar
— First published in [ Issue 3 ], September 2018