* En anglais uniquement
Hi-Tek played a major role in the highly admired golden-age revivalist sound affiliated with the Rawkus Records collective, crafting many of the label's initial breakthrough releases. While
Hi-Tek's production style owes a debt to New York's finest beat-makers from the early '90s --
DJ Premier,
Pete Rock,
Large Professor -- the producer actually arose from Cincinnati's low-key hip-hop scene rather than the streets of Brooklyn. Local mentors such as Ravi T, J-Fresh, and Sen Sai showed the aspiring youth how to craft beats, and by 1992 he had crossed paths with
Mood, one of the Midwest city's premier hip-hop groups.
Hi-Tek collaborated on the song "Hustle on the Side" and helped the group score a record deal. Years later, the producer befriended
Talib Kweli, who was in town working with
Mood. This affiliation eventually spawned the
Reflection Eternal duo, one of the first acts to put the Rawkus label on the map. But it was
Hi-Tek's work with
Kweli and
Mos Def on the milestone album
Black Star (1998) that first made the producer a hot commodity. He next collaborated exclusively with
Kweli for
Reflection Eternal (2000), an album that crossed over from the b-boy camp to the mass market and became a critically championed coast-to-coast success. Then came
Hi-Tek's solo spotlight on Rawkus,
Hi-Teknology (2001), which featured a broad range of up-and-coming MCs, including some of his Cincinnati peers. Between releases he produced tracks for a broad array of rappers, including such notables as
Snoop Dogg,
Blackalicious, and
Raphael Saadiq, all the while shopping around for labels to issue his second solo album, finally settling on Babygrande.
Hi-Teknology 2 (2006), which included verses from
Nas,
Q-Tip,
Busta Rhymes, and of course
Kweli, was followed by a much less star-studded
Hi-Teknology 3 late the next year. ~ Jason Birchmeier