“When it comes to keeping the Philly Music tradition going…Cosmo has it locked. His knowledge is incredible and his Crates are deep and his passion and skills makes him one of my faves.”

-Jazzy Jeff

alking to Cosmo Baker is like talking to one of the invisible hands behind Philly’s most recent rise to musical prominence. One third of the famous DJ/dance party troika, The Rub, and the founder of the legendary Philly, Remedy 215 party—Baker has been at ground zero of the Northeast music scene, for a good minute. This last statement is so true that one can play “Six Degrees of Cosmo Baker” with the Illadelph’s own most recent, storied and celebrated acts, and still they would barely scratch the surface of his connections to his hometown and its artists.

Baker started DJing early; way before he could even get into the clubs that he ended up rocking. At seventeen he DJ’d at one of Philly’s biggest night clubs in the early ‘90s, a spot known as, Revival. It was a night club that was known to be “the most decadent,”—in his words—to say the least. It was the kind of spot where Philly heads congregated looking for escapism, and where they went to get loose—real loose.

It was on the first night that he spun there, all of seventeen, fresh-faced and wet behind the ears; that he hit the doubting, older, hungry soul heads with the sounds of Al Green and Roy Ayres— a sound that he theoretically wasn’t supposed to be familiar with due to his youth. It was a move that quickly earned him respect from the crowd of unbelieving, salty-veterans, and it eventually earned him a residency there and at other spots, just by way of his intuitive ability to know just how to kill a crowd with their most desired tracks.

In 2003, he became a permanent member of The Rub, after filling in and guesting, melding his skills with the two other prominent members and his close, personal friends, DJ Ayers and DJ Eleven. It was a move that has proven to be monumental, because since then, The Rub party and The Rub team, have built quite the following. And this is where we pick up…Catching Cosmo at the end of a marathon touring schedule that had him, Eleven and Ayers criss-crossing all over the states, Baker was in fine form going over everything from the history of B-More (Baltimore) “Gutta Music,” to his travels, moving to Brooklyn and the local Philly scene. It was an honor to sit-down with the man for what was about an hour’s time, pre-performance, at the end of The Rub’s tour, on the crew’s last stop, at LA’s Cinespace, before they all got some much needed rest.

Starting in 2006, with a vision-blurring tour schedule that began with the XXXplosive tour, Baker and his The Rub cohorts were men-on-a-mission, taking to the road like Mad Max. As he said: “It’s crazy…I was looking at the calendar from January first through April first—so the first quarter of the year—I’m away more than I’m home…It’s a lot of hotels…And it’s crazy too, because people say that like ‘Oh DJing is such a glamorous life,’ and I’m like, yeah, well, I see the airport; I see the hotel, I see the club, I see the hotel…I see the airport.” When I linked up with him, Baker talked briefly about hip-hop and its influence around the world, as he experienced it and observed it, from behind turntables and Serato boxes saying:

“It’s funny, because obviously people are taking what they know, which is the blueprint, which is like American hip-hop in particular, like East Coast based hip-hop, something that was born out of the Bronx: After thirty years, through all the different incarnations and the way hip-hop has changed, through you know, the Golden Era of the ‘80s, the way that the West Coast came up out of electro music, and like P-Funk, back to the East Coast and then the South—was always there bubbling, and then the South rose… Basically, it’s funny to see how that’s translated— and all that is translated—with all these people, all across, in different places and how they take all these elements and make it their own.”

Still, Philly, aside from all of the man’s travels, is where Baker made his name and it is his heart, waxing poetic about the love the town has for its fellow residents and the camaraderie between its artists in chance encounters, even providing a story about how tightly knit the city is, by speaking of an encounter a world away in Bangkok, with some of the city’s residents, and how instantly a bond was formed. Raised with a background that always had music mending to his experience taking it in “like a fish to water,” DJing seems to be in his blood. As a kid he got a job at a grocery store to get his first turntables. Just a short time later, he was taken under the wing of local legend, DJ Storm, and later King Britt—both men mentoring him— with Baker eventually doing the “Back to Basics” party with King Britt.

There are two distinct Philadelphias when it comes to current music, I think. There is the world that thinks of it still in a reference of Neo-Soul, and then there is the world who thinks of it through the looking glass of its DJ scene: of the Jazzy Jeff and King Britt and Cosmo Baker etc. Sitting there at the nexus of both popular conceptions of his town’s newest musical contributions since day one, Baker touched on the rise of Neo-Soul saying “It was a magical time in hip-hop,” adding: “To me it was like an extension of the Mcfadden & Whitehead sound, you know, the sound of Philadelphia…”

Despite his love for the city, Baker moved on to Brooklyn in 2003, with his lady, after doing a year of traveling to Southpaw to DJ, to finally and permanently solidify The Rub team, after feeling that he had “hit a glass ceiling” in Philly, and a legion of NYC party-goers and music heads are the better for it. Saying he had felt blessed to have the kind of success he has seen with both his first party, Remedy 215, whom he partnered with fellow “Illadelph” DJ icon, Rich Medina, and now The Rub, “I feel so pleased that I had that once in my life, and I have it twice with The Rub. It’s crazy, it’s amazing. You know, I’m so blessed- it’s insane.” If you’re from Philly and run into Cosmo Baker say “What up!?!?”—he’ll have nothing but mad love for ya. And if you are ever in New York looking for something to do, check out The Rub, I guarantee, that they will blow your mind.

Visit Cosmo Baker’s site [Here]

Visit The Rub [Here]

Listen to Cosmo and The Rub at Brooklyn Radio [Here]