B. O. daTrio
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B. O. daTrio

| INDIE

| INDIE
Band Hip Hop Gospel

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This band has not uploaded any videos

Music

The best kept secret in music

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Discography

Still working on that hot first release.

Photos

Feeling a bit camera shy

Bio

You can almost hear the unison fists banging on the Meyer-Levin School of Performing Arts lunchtables. “My name is Jeff and I play no games/ get on the mic and I do my thang…” It’s hard to get him to stop when he’s in the elementary flow of rhymes that reminisce his Brooklyn childhood, but B.O. daTrio has a whole life to tell in verse that has become complicated and exciting over the years. And, yet he seems at a loss to explain why he first started rhyming.

“Yeah, Meyer-Levin right down the block from Lucky corner. I.S. 285 performing arts school, if you was in there you always had one class that was art or band or something (I played the steel drums).”

All of this describes the environment that he found lyricism in, but there’s still some difficulty in getting him to answer directly where the initial attraction to street poetry came from. He mentions his family’s Grenadian culture transplanted in Brooklyn where he was born and raised and the ubiquity of calypso music as diced between island 45’s by his DJ uncle. He muses on his older sister’s VHS mixtapes of old school videos, bringing to mind fuzzy magnetic tape edit points between the end of “The Freaks Come Out At Night” and the beginning of “Microphone Fiend”.

And it doesn’t get anymore specific from there.

“Okay, when I was seven my parents split up…” He goes that far back to recall an early age where self-expression became a necessity. “My moms raised me as well as she could so at some point I could learn for myself. You know, art school was s’pose to keep you on track but at the same time that was when the gang violence started getting crazy in New York.”

It’s hard to tell if his influences were so strong that they suggested a life of poetry to him, but there’s no doubt that they are still with him. He rails off a list of heavyweights that signify an erudite love of his craft that is unusual for emcees his age, “Big Daddy Kane, Whodini, Redman, Lost Boyz, Wu Tang, Busta, of course Nas and Biggie…” Once again it’s hard to get him to stop, but when I point out that many of these artists came from his area it comes as such a matter of fact that he doesn’t have anything to say. It’s like asking a lion to describe his place in the animal kingdom.

B.O. definitely has a predatorial eye for the stage and is anxious to thrive in this testing ground that too many successful recording artists seem to bypass. His live show is bursting with energy and improvised charisma and his cultural role as crowd-moving emcee is completely preserved in front of an audience.

When he’s in the booth or onstage, it’s hard to think of him as anything but a natural for the future, maybe it doesn’t even matter where it came from. Anyway, he’s obviously more focused on things to come. “If you see how I work right now, I got unlimited amounts of things to say and I don’t stop learning. I’ll parlet with anybody… I wanna be a staple.”

Oh, my other question… where did the name “B.O.” come from?

“BlackOut, the trio.” Apparently, there’s three sides to every story: what you think, what you know, and the truth. B.O.’s story is no exception.