Jeru/Master Ace The Scala, London
Jeru is a man with conflicts. Is he a conscious rapper with mad inteligence dropping gems of wisdome on hip hop's enlightened? Or is he just another moany old rapper who got by on Primo's primo beats?
It is was with this question that I stepped up to the doors of London's Scala last thursday. Skipping the long queue of B-humans waiting for tickets on the door. "Who is supporting Jeru?" says my bad self to the monseenior on the door. Pre-show info on who was supporting had been sketchy and my buddy and I had pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to be seeing Jeru and maybe some local talent if we were lucky.
The monseenior says two words, "Master" and "Ace".
Well pleased with the prospect of seeing a golden age legend rock the mic we ducked into the building double speed and did the normal frisk and "MOVE UP THE STAIRS PLEASE" shit.
Once we had the appropriate bevarages in our mits we did our best to get into a decent position amongst the as ever too tall dudes, and suprisingly abundant female humans. Ty was on stage to introduce the acts and with only a small amount of "Check check wun too wun tooooo" Krispy 3 (yes three sir) stepped up to get repped up.
They did a couple of thier well known tracks but were hurried off stage as the night was running behind schedule as per usual. This being a London audience Krispy only got love from the one hendred or so heads with the knowledge, while the rest of the crowd waited for the US acts to come on.
Ace burst on stage surprising everyone by not wearing a hat, he introduced his DJ, Steady Pace who is still with the Master after all these years. Then it was straight into the rhymes, no bullshit.
Ace rocked joints like "Jeep ass nigguh", "Crooklyn", "I got ta" and "Music man" and had the crowd in a frenzy. If the audience was short of Krispy fans it was not short of people who knew what a legend this BK rapper is and those that didn't know, they learnt. Ace rifled through the classics at hyper speed as his set was obviously being cut short, after a few more gems from the crates Steady Pace threw on "Letter to the better" and people were going off all over the place. Masta Ace who hasn't released an album since about 95 should definately still be considered one of the greatest when it comes to crowd moving, even doing Biz Markie's verse on "Me and the Biz" perfectly and dropping his classic lines from "The Symphony". He closed it out with "The Ride" and that was all she wrote, dope.
This near perfect set drove home the sheer lack of respect evident in putting Jeru above Ace on the bill, not to mention the fact that they cut Ace's set short for about an hour of DJ Pogo on the wheels before Jeru came on.
Still we who were sleeping on Jeru seemed to be in the minority as he got serious love from the London crowd. Stopping before doing "The Bitchez" to explain how he wasn't being bad,you know, he was just talking about some women, he didn't manage to convince me he was the prophet he would like to think he is and only came off as a clumsy sexist uncle at a Christmas party.
His set was unjustifiably long and could have had a good third of his material dropped from it, so once the DJ Premier produced classics "D.Original", "I'm the man" and "Come Clean" were out of the way we stepped to the lobby, finished our drinks and swapped witty anecdotes as we made our way out into the cold shitty streets of Kings Cross and the inevitable hour lonfgwait for a night bus.
All things said Master Ace's set will stay with me for a long time and showed that if he wanted he could easily do like Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rapp, and make a serious come back, but the diss handed to him by putting the blatantly flawed Jeru at top billing was too hard to swallow.
Peace to Millie and Al who got the bus with me and made for some interesting conversation even if I was drunk as a skunk.
- BSE | profile
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