Josh One contemplating ‘Tolerance’

PHOTO by ZACK PIANKO

Josh One moved to California as a little kid from Louisiana and found it slow right from the start: “I was like, ‘I learned this last year!’” he laughs now, remembering crash disillusionment in fourth grade. And he may well have recalled how it felt to be out front of everybody else when his 2001 composition “Contemplation” spawned an epochal King Britt remix (“Everybody and their mom played it—that’s gonna be there forever!”), or maybe when his own 2004 Nappy Roots “Po Folks” remix—his first major label effort—went platinum and almost sucked in a Grammy, too. Now something of an eminence gris among local DJs and producers—as a co-founder of Costa Mesa’s decade-old Abstract Workshop, Josh’s credits have crossed with just about every hip-hop heavy but Masta Ace—he’s readying a self-released follow-up to 2004’s Narrow Path on Immergent Records. Sophomore Tolerance makes Path’s portentous beats even more playable, he says—ready for anywhere from the bathtub to the club.

It’s been awhile since your last album. How do you write now? Have you changed?I try to be as open-minded as I used to be. Who knows what I’m gonna start with? I find a rhythm and go from there. Sometimes it’s pretty random. For instance: on the new record, I’d just woken up from a night of debauchery at our studio in Hollywood, and the record was still spinning. Like the end of the record was stuck, and I thought, ‘Ah, man, it sounds really cool—I should record . . . ah, no!’ But I forced myself to do it, and I put it in the drum machine and put a beat over it, and it made my record! I have Lateef the Truth Speaker, Imani from the Pharcyde, Jud Nester and Lili De la Mora, Blu, Poet Name Life, Eighty, Golden who’s from Minnesota—L. Shankar, an older violinist—he’s huge! He sings while Lateef is rapping. I e-mailed beats to people to get the vibe, and everything I got back exceeded my expectations. I’d like to think there’s something in the tracks that made people pull something off—I’d love to entertain that idea. And I got a song with Sean Paul coming out May 20 on iTunes—’Fahrenheit’ featuring Sean Paul. I got a lot of dub in my music—I went to Jamaica a couple times. I assume that’s why he liked my stuff, that dub influence.

What records did you get in Jamaica?
I didn’t pick up records—I was at every studio trying to make records! I was in people’s closets and random shit. Everyone had a setup like mine at home. In Port Antonio, I went to Gee Jam studios. It was a little small resort with a private beach and the studio hanging over a cliff.

Have you fulfilled all the dreams your 16-year-old self would have wanted you to fulfill?
No! I’m always excited for every little instance that comes up—I’m not immune to something cool happening. I do want to work with every rapper I grew up on—maybe Q-Tip? There’s so many. Common—I did a remix for Common, though it was kind of unofficial. Myka 9 from Freestyle Fellowship—he was on my first record. He’s the first one I worked with. I was amazed by his talent on ‘Afterhours,’ that’s for sure. He was a cool guy; he made it happen, and I was like, ‘Wow, I can do this!’

Do you still have whatever they sent you when you got that Grammy nomination?
No, I only heard about the Grammy nomination. But I’ve got my platinum record—up on the wall! Josh One—the one-hit wonder! That was for that remix of Nappy Roots in 2004. It was random—a guy from Atlantic heard it and was like, ‘I got all these artists—take a crack at remixing.’ So I remixed it and got it! And after that I got a whole bunch of major-label remix opportunities and I never got any more, but that first one I tried. I don’t know! I like to think my music got better. Maybe it got worse!

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Tags: josh one, Long Beach, Music, nappy roots, que sera, remix