One night almost a decade ago, Stephen Levitin was leaving a movie at Southpoint when a jazz band in the plaza stopped him in his tracks. He was especially floored by the saxophonist, whom he approached after the set. They went on to cut several tracks together, including “AfroTrap,” where sinewy sax licks link up the slabs of a mammoth beat.
“At some point in the sessions, he said, ‘You don’t know who I play with, do you?’” Levitin recalls. “I was like, ‘No, you’re the guy I saw at Southpoint who could make this instrument do backflips.’” As it turned out, the guy in question was Marcus Anderson, then a staple in Prince’s band.
“AfroTrap” appears on Love Love, the new producer album by Levitin, aka the Apple Juice Kid. A clearinghouse for tracks he made over years in the Triangle, it touches on every point in his fascinating career: drumming in the ’90s jazz-hop band Sankofa, cofounding the Beat Making Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2012, and placing beats with big artists like Azealia Banks, Mos Def, and Wale.
In the COVID era, Levitin has been living in Melbourne, Australia, and he’s picked up the accent so strongly you’d never guess he’s a North Carolina native. But the home fires burn brightly on Love Love, which teems with features by locals such as Diali Cissokho and Trice Be and has original artwork by painter Mark Abercrombie.
“I’ve always been kind of a chameleon,” Levitin says via video chat. That’s evident on an album where the style seamlessly shifts from ’90s hip-hop to reggaeton to big-tent house, or to whatever idiom will activate the vocalists on the marquee. In collecting the vibrant stubs of larger projects that weren’t to be (the Anderson songs, for instance, had hopes of reaching Prince until he passed away), Love Love portrays an artist relentlessly pressing the point where serendipity and opportunity meet.
For example, when Levitin heard that the famed DJ Spooky would be appearing at a conference in Saxapahaw, he finagled himself into the lineup. There he connected with Spooky and then wound up doing some work on Spooky’s 2018 album Phantom Dancehall for reggae giant VP Records. The budget was gone by then, but he said he’d work for free if the label would send them to Jamaica for authentic final mixes. They did, for three days, but he stayed for months, eventually meeting the iconic rhythm duo Sly and Robbie.
Several Love Love tracks incorporate unreleased session files they gave him, including the standout “Dictionary.” It also has the melodic fingerprint of auxiliary producer Sup Doodle, a star pupil of Beat Making Lab, which Levitin cofounded with Pierce Freelon and Mark Katz to build community around the technical side of hip-hop, leading workshops and donating equipment in Senegal, Panama, Ethiopia, and other places around the world. The project also became an Emmy-winning PBS show of the same name in 2013.
“I made a trip back to Jamaica to play the songs for Sly and Robbie, and they flipped out,” Levitin says. “My original intention was to make a group with them, but then Robbie died in 2021, and Beat Making Lab getting really big had put a lot of my producing on the side burner.”
Of course, with a glance at Love Love’s track list, you’re probably most curious about “Time,” in which the rapper Ace Henderson, who is from Raleigh, chops it up with Deepak Chopra. That New Age titan is whom Levitin asked to meet when Spooky offered to open his “golden Rolodex” in return for working on the dancehall project.
“I’m a very spiritual person, and he’s someone I respected that also has a lot of success,” Levitin explains, noting Chopra’s ties to Oprah Winfrey. “I thought if Oprah could get wind of Beat Making Lab, I could get in that upper echelon. Like a lot of things I do, it’s half me on a personal level and half an entrepreneurial level. I’d have been one of a million producers that Jay-Z had met, so somehow, in my little chess game of life, this seemed like the right move.”
Chopra wound up interviewing Levitin onstage in New York. The night before, Levitin decided to sample Chopra’s voice from an audiobook and make a beat to play live. That first version of “Time” also sampled Oprah, which had to be cut because that connection didn’t pan out—yet. But Levitin did travel to India with Chopra’s team to explore doing a Beat Making Lab there.
Several songs feature guitar, bass, keys, and vocals by Mark Wells and Matt Brandau, Levitin’s compatriots since Sankofa, which was one of the biggest party bands at UNC in the ’90s, opening for groups like OutKast and the Roots and selling out Cat’s Cradle shows. On Love Love, they appear on the radiant “Wake Up,” which also features rapper Geechi Suede from Camp Lo, a New York duo known for the 1996 hit “Luchini AKA This Is It.”
They later moved to North Carolina and became one of the most important connections of Levitin’s life. This was after college and Sankofa, when he had been winning beat battles with Nirvana samples and bongo solos, first at Local 506 and then at top events in New York.
“I was playing drums for YahZarah in Raleigh, and Suede saw me there,” he remembers. “He also saw me in a battle with 9th Wonder at NCCU. It was the first time I’d had anyone from the music industry really corner me and say, ‘You’re the one; I want to get in the studio with you.’” The duo has now done multiple projects together as Freebass 808. “I love that this is the first song and has probably my closest friends in the world. They’d be the best men at my wedding.”
Indeed, inasmuch as Love Love is a producer’s showcase, it’s also a document of his personal journey since his last producer album, Plus+, more than 20 years ago.
“I fell a bit into the artist trap of wanting the album to be perfect,” Levitin says, “and after Plus+, I was in the music industry cycle of trying to get beats placed with major artists. I’m so excited for my next producer album; I almost guarantee you there will be another album in a year or two because of the cathartic release of this material.”
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