How did Will Smith meet DJ Jazzy Jeff?
DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince were one of the earliest hip-hop acts to ever gain mainstream attention, even picking up the first Grammy Award for ‘Best Rap Performance’ in ’89. The duo made history together, but how did Jeff Townes and Will Smith get together in the first place?
It turns out that, before they worked as a duo, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were both active in the Philadelphia house party scene of the mid-’80s. They had both been vaguely familiar with each other for a while, but they only ended up performing together after someone else entirely let Jazzy Jeff down.
As Jeff recounted during a 2023 conversation with Hits Daily Double, he used to DJ around Philly a lot with an MC named Ice. One night, Jeff was invited to play at a party, but, when he tried to call Ice to bring him along, he couldn’t get through to him.
“I called Ice but he didn’t answer,” Jeff explained. “This was long before cellphones. But I had to do it, so I went by myself. It turned out to be the house next door to Will’s.”
Jeff was a man down, facing the prospect of having to play at this party without an MC to carry things along. But, fatefully, he got chatting to this guy from next door—someone who wasn’t shy on the mic.
“We go down to the basement and we’re setting up,” Jeff recalled. “I knew of Will and he knew of me. He came down and I was, like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Where’s Ice?’ I said, ‘I called him but he didn’t answer.’ Will said, ‘Well, you mind if I rock with you?’ So he got on the mic.”
The newly formed duo instantly established an almost telepathic rapport. “The chemistry was instant,” Jeff said in an earlier interview with CityPaper.net in 2002. “How did he know I was about to bring this record? How did I know his punchline was on the fourth bar and to drop out? Plus we were the biggest jackasses each other ever knew.”
The impromptu gig went so well that Jeff decided to ask Smith to join him again. “At the end of the night, we sat around packing up the equipment and talking,” he recalled to Hits Daily Double. “I said, ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ And he said, ‘Nothing.’ So I said, ‘Well, I got another party if you want to come.’ And he was, like, ‘Yeah.’”
So, had MC Ice not been busy or otherwise engaged, the world may never have come to know DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. “We all have Ice to thank,” Jeff acknowledged. “And if I’m not mistaken, we did one or two shows with Will and Ice. But Will was so charismatic that Ice just kind of faded out. At that point in time, none of us knew this was going to be a career. We never thought about that. It was just something you did.”