Producer and record label auteur Chris Manak, aka Peanut Butter Wolf, is returning to San Jose for his second homecoming appearance this year. The founder of the taste-making Stones Throw Records, an LA-based indie label that was once home to alternative hip-hop OGs like MF Doom, J Dilla and Madlib, headlined the Jazz Beyond stage at the 2019 San Jose Jazz Summer Fest. As Peanut Butter Wolf has grown his label, his curatorial tastes have only broadened. He’ll be discussing his musical journey during this free talk celebrating hip-hop history month.

Peanut Butter Wolf
Thu, 6pm, Free
King Library, San Jose

It’s been a year since Needle to the Groove hosted Egyptian Lover and Peanut Butter Wolf at The Ritz. This weekend, the local record shop is doing it again. Renowned producer and recording artist Prince Paul will be on stage, spinning complex alternative beats with a traditional hip-hop twist. Known for collaborations like Handsome Boy Modeling School and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, Prince Paul recently teamed up with Ladybug Mecca, Rodrigo Brandão and Don Newkirk to form BROOKZILL! In 2016. Paul is joined by Peanut Butter Wolf and the Bombay Bluesman himself, Aki Kumar.

Prince Paul & Peanut Butter Wolf
Sun, 7pm, $10+
The Ritz, San Jose

Not long after Chris Manak moved to Los Angeles to live with underground hip-hop producer Madlib, Metro reached out to the founder of Stones Throw Records and asked him to share highlights from his youth growing up on San Jose’s East Side.

By the time of the article’s publication, Manak—better known by his DJ stage name, Peanut Butter Wolf—had already made a name for himself as a crate-digging extraordinaire and curator of off-kilter hip-hop, soul and funk artists. Fast forward more than a decade, past the acclaimed 2013 documentary on Stones Throw, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton, and we find Manak still on his game.

In addition to helping bring greater attention to legendary Detroit producer J-Dilla and raise the profiles of weirdo emcees like MF Doom, in recent years Manak’s label has also championed the retro-future sounds of Dâm-Funk and Mayer Hawthorne—as well as Tuxedo, Hawthorne’s latest project with Jake One. And along the way, Manak has made friends with some of hip-hop’s pioneers. Manak, as Peanut Butter Wolf, joins one such trail blazer at The Ritz this Friday.

“It’s kind of a special event for me, because I haven’t spun there in a long time,” Manak says over the phone from Los Angeles. He expects to reconnect with some of the old high school buddies he used to make mixtapes for while in town. But the show is also a testament to how far he’s come since founding Stones Throw more than 20 years ago.

Early hip-hop producer Egyptian Lover first broke out in the early ’80s—paving the way for such seminal West Coast producers like Dr. Dre by deploying synthesizers and drum machines in creation of hip-hop beats that sounded nothing like what his East Coast contemporaries were producing at the time.

Back then, Egyptian Lover—a.k.a. Greg Broussard—was a personal hero of Manak. In his 2002 contribution to Metro, Manak tells of getting dropped off at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds in 1986 for an Egyptian Lover show. These days, the two are homies who sometimes grab drinks or pizza together and chop it up as peers. “Those are the moments that are important to me,” he says.

Manak grew up around music. His grandfather was a jazz bassist who played with some of the greats, including Dizzy Gillespie. “I think a lot of our music came from him,” he muses. His mother was a singer, who played the role of Maria in a production of West Side Story in college. His dad, who was in the military, also enjoyed singing and Manak says he was a background vocalist on a song that cracked the Top 40.

Being raised by a jazz musician father left Manak’s mother weary of the music biz. “She didn’t want to see me in the music industry,” he says. Nevertheless, both he and his brother—Jonny, leader of San Jose punk veterans Jonny Manak and the Depressives—ended up pursuing music seriously. The two actually played in a band for a while when they were very young.

“I was in a punk rock band with him,” Manak says of working with his younger bro, Jonny. “The band was actually called Peanut Butter Wolf and he was the singer—he was like 8 years old.”

In the years that followed those first PBW sessions, the elder Manak would go on to thoroughly impress the owners of Star Records in San Jose with his deep hip-hop knowledge. He later worked at the store.

All of these factors add up to a nostalgic homecoming for Manak, who says he wishes he could play more shows and book more Stones Throw artists in San Jose—and with the way things have been going downtown, he’s optimistic that he just might. The show, promoted by local record shop and boutique label Needle to the Groove, is another example in a string of choice concerts to land in downtown San Jose in recent months.

Peanut Butter Wolf
Apr 21, 8pm, $22+
The Ritz, San Jose

Erykah Badu is at the top of the list of some recent additions to this year’s San Jose Summer Jazz Fest. The neo-soul legend won’t be singing however; she’s spinning records under her the moniker DJ Lo Down Loretta Brown. Her DJ side project began in 2011, and she spins frequently at clubs, bringing an eclectic mix of hip-hop, jazz, soul, funk and even a little EDM.

Other artists just announced for the festival include New York’s rising jazz pianist Kris Bowers, New Orleans R&B singer Ledisi, Poncho Sanchez Band, who will be performing a tribute to the late great Latin percussionist Armando Peraza, as well as label showcases by Peanut Butter Wolf’s cutting edge funk/hip-hip Stone Throw Records and Harlem’s jazz and world beat label Motéma Music.

This is a big year for the San Jose Summer Jazz Festival as they celebrate their 25 year mark milestone. Bootsy Collins has already been announced as this summer’s headliner. This year’s festival lasts between Friday August 8 and Sunday August 10. The festival started back in 1990 in downtown San Jose when the city was undergoing major efforts to rebuild the area. Starting out on a single stage the first year, The San Jose Jazz Festival has grown alongside downtown San Jose and now boasts 11 stages, and even happens twice a year—known as the summer and winter fests.

Between now and August 6th, 3-Day passes will be on sale: $55: General admission, $65 All Stage Access, $150: Priority Access, $285: VIP.

As a member of the iconic South Bay hip-hop group Subcontents, Tape Mastah Steph was an integral part of the emerging underground hip-hop scene in San Jose back in the ’90s. Today, he still is, even though he moved out of California almost a decade ago.

He recently produced The Treatment, the latest solo record from his friend and former Subcontents collaborator Dave Dub. Dub, of course, now heads the Isolated Wax crew, maintaining the most important hip-hop label in the South Bay.

But the connections don’t end there. Dub’s new joint was released in May on Stones Throw Records, run by San Jose expat Peanut Butter Wolf. Steph has released a companion beat mix called Courtesy Flush, also out on Stones Throw.

Wolf was the first person to show Steph how to use an Ensoniq EPS sequencer, back when they were both pause-mixing in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Crazy how things come full circle—for Dub’s record, Steph convinced him to use nothing but the tools they had back in the day: an SP-1200 and…an Ensoniq EPS.

Steph, who now splits his time between Houston and Vegas, will return to San Jose tonight for a DJ show at Johnny V’s spotlighting Stones Throw artists that will also feature Baron Zen and Danny Hackintosh.

“You can expect to hear some original work in the mix with classic grooves and all that jazz,” Steph tells me.

TAPE MASTAH STEPH performs Friday, Aug. 10, at 9pm at Johnny V’s in San Jose; free.

Peanut Butter Wolf works in mysterious ways.

The South Bay music legend pioneered sophisticated production in San Jose’s underground scene in the early ‘90s, before founding the Stones Throw label and signing hip-hop revolutionaries like Madlib, J Rocc and J Dilla. And he’s still engineering musical mini-movements, as Boston band Sonnymoon learned when they first arrived on Wolf’s current turf in SoCal last September.

“He came to our show when we played with Teebs in LA,” says Dane Orr, one half of the Sonnymoon duo. “That night, Wolf was like ‘This guy Jonti’s coming to LA, you guys gotta link up. That was the first time I ever heard of Jonti. Which is kind of funny, since now we’re on tour together, but it’s really cool.”

That tour comes to Pagoda Lounge in San Jose this week, with Jonti and Sonnymoon headlining a show lined top to bottom with forward-thinking, sometimes nearly unclassifiable electro and hip-hop acts like Portland’s Devonwho and San Jose’s own B. Lewis. Knxwledge and Mndsgn are performing at other stops on the tour.

That Wolf’s dropped hint would turn out to be prophetic is surprising since Jonti and Sonnymoon seem so outwardly different. Jonti, an Australian multi-instrumentalist who released his first album, Twirligig, last year, is one of the most fascinating signings on Stones Throw; at the time Wolf described it like this: “I understand the pop references because his music is so catchy, but the arrangements blew me away. I couldn’t figure out how the hell he did what he did. That he did it all on his own at such an early age kinda scared me. I knew right away I needed to add him to the roster.”

Jonti’s music is generally more introspective and despite its intricate, catchy beats, solidly based in a singer-songwriter tradition. His remarkable talent for beatmaking somewhat obscures the fact that in many ways he’s a Nick Drake for the 21st century. Sonnymoon’s ambient brand of electronic music has an epic, cosmic feel that pushes at outward boundaries of sound.

And yet, there are, at a deeper level, a lot of similarities between these artists. Both Sonnymoon and Jonti represent a new kind of experimentation in the ever-more-blurred boundaries between electro and guitar-based rock and folk, between digital and analog. They both reject the retro (mainly ’80s-based) nostalgia that has been the trend in electronic music for several years now—an artistic decision that is not to be taken lightly, as Sonnymoon discovered.

A huge “South Bay Urban Block Party” is set for April 22 at 7th and Martha in downtown San Jose. Exact details have yet to officially be released, but headliners are expected to include local hip-hop legend Peanut Butter Wolf, as well as Planet Asia, Zion I, Locksmith and Sahtyre.

Peanut Butter Wolf (aka Chris Manak) is of course San Jose’s most famous hip-hop export. He got his start pause-mixing here in the early ’90s, and more or less brought the groundbreaking Ensoniq Performance Sampler (EPS) technology to the South Bay underground. He and his rapping partner, Milpitas’ Charles Hicks (MC Charizma), were signed to a major label before Hicks was tragically shot and killed in East Palo Alto. Peanut Butter Wolf carried on, producing Kool Keith’s first single and signing some of hip-hop’s most brilliant minds—Madlib, J Rocc, J Dilla—to his Stone Throw label, which he now operates out of SoCal.

He also had a big impact on other South Bay rappers and producers like Tape Mastah Steph, who founded the iconic local crew Subcontents with Dave Dub and Matt Gamin.

The block party will be an all-day event, beginning at noon on Sunday, April 22 and running through 8pm. The theme of the event is celebrating the “four elements” of hip hip: dancing, emceeing, DJing and graffiti.