Vidal Hazelton may go all out on the football field, but he’s also comfortable doing three-quarter time.
The Eskimos’ 30-year-old wide receiver likes music. Well, that would be an understatement. Hazelton has always listened to music, but now he’s starting to do a lot more with the beats and tunes.
“I can’t go to sleep without playing music,” he said. “I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I do is put music on my iPhone, and I brush my teeth just to get my day going. Music is just a huge part of me.”
Hazelton, who has played in only eight games this year after suffering a foot injury in the season opener, likes to be the DJ in the Eskimos’ locker room, putting on the music before and after games and practices.
“I listen to so many different types of music, so I’m all over (the place),” he said about his musical preferences. “There’s so many guys from Alabama, Houston, New York; there’s so many different types of music that everybody loves from around the world. That’s why it’s easy for me to play music for the team because I don’t just play music for the things that I love to hear. I know what everybody likes to listen to – so I just dab with it.”
He eventually wants to be a real DJ.
“I haven’t really had a DJ-ing set, but I think I’ll be pretty good at DJ-ing,” he said. “I know how to keep the emotions of a crowd going and keep everybody into it.”
But that’s just scratching the surface of Hazelton’s musical talents. He recently realized he has the ability to make music himself. His off-season “hobby” the past few years has been engineering, recording and producing music for his New York friends. Lately, he’s also started doing some rapping and record of his own music.
“I built a nice little studio (in his father’s basement about five years ago),” he said. “It’s one of those holes-in-the-wall places where you can just hang out and make your music. It’s kind of the environment I deal with here. Some people just like that comfortable vibe unlike a super fancy (place like) the Apple office, where they can’t drink or spill, you know, the places that make you feel like you’ve got to take your shoes off because everything is so nice in here.
“I like to mess around with different sounds and beats. It’s been working out pretty good in every off-season. It’s kind of what I like to do.”
Hazelton charges a fee for people to record in his studio, but also offers tips when his clients need help.
“It’s like their own personal music, whether they do music videos and post it on YouTube or it’s for their own personal use. I’ve got a lot of friends who want to be musicians. They have their own career, so they come to me and ask me to record things for them.
“People are always asking me how the music sounds. I just engineer, make sure everything is good, the sound, the beats and stuff. It’s kind of a big deal for them. They use it for their music, their projects and stuff that they have.
“To me, a studio is like a natural vibe. You would come over to my studio, and I would play a bunch of beats for you and try to find songs you like. You get that vibe and that feeling and eventually you would start making music. You would start right into whatever instrumental you would hear. Then once you start writing for your instrumental, I would take that beat and put it into a system called Pro Tools (a digital audio workstation). Once I put it in Pro Tools, it’s set up for you to record your song. Once you record the song, I’m behind the computer saying you could have said this word clearer, maybe just helping you if you’re stuck in the writing process where you can’t think of anything else, so I’ll give that spark and help the song get created.
“Once the song is recorded, then it’s another process of mixing and mastering before the song is 100 per cent complete.”
How long the process takes can vary from client to client.
“Sometimes it comes fast,” he said. “Sometimes, people come in and have an idea or a beat they already want to use, and it’s easy for me.
“Sometimes, if you want to create a song from the jump, there’s a lot of elements that go into creating a song – it’s the vibe, it’s what you want to talk about, your mood, your perspective on a song. You could be having a bad day, and a lot of things are going on with your family, and that’s the type of song that you’ll be in the mood to make. It’s not like something that’s forced. It’s more like a process that’s like organic, it just happens.”
Apparently, Hazelton’s new-found skill is a result of growing up around different cultures and being exposed to various types of music in Staten Island, one of New York City’s five boroughs that’s only a 25-minute ferry ride from Manhattan or across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge from Brooklyn.
“My family is from the islands (Trinidad), so we listened to a lot of reggae and calyspo,” Hazelton said. “We listen to a lot of different genres.
“That’s why it was kind of easy for me to make good music because I listened to so much different music. I listened to hip-hop, R&B. I listened to country music. I listened to so many different genres that my music is so wide open. Once I heard a beat, I know what I wanted to hear, and I know what good music sounds like.
“That helped me with the transition into me actually making music.”
Vidal often talks music with his father, Dexter, discussing different styles and songs. Dexter managed musical artists like the Wu-Tang Clan (a Staten Island group whose 1993 debut album is considered one of the greatest albums in hip-hop history), Jamaican-American dancehall-reggae star Shaggy and Elephant Man, another Jamaican dancehall recording artist.
“He’s still managing a few artists,” Hazelton said. “He’s always sending me songs asking me what I think. I just give him an honest opinion, so it’s pretty cool.
“My dad has always been involved with music since I was small,” he continued. “It’s something I grew into. I’ve always been around it, but I never realized it was a talent I had. I just always knew I liked to listen to music. Eventually, I figured out I had a love to do it.”
Because of his off-season football workout schedule, Hazelton still can’t put 100-per-cent effort into his music hobby. But he wants to take it a lot further.
“I plan to eventually have a label and start a music group, searching for talent,” he said. “I have music, myself, too. I have somebody editing a music video for me right now for one of my songs.
“That’s where I see the future, but that’s just one thing. I’ve got so many things that I like to do. I see myself in the future dabbing around with a lot of different things, but music is definitely one of them.”
The music video is for a song called My Life.
“It’s conscious kind of rap, more like Jayco J type of music,” he said. “The song is really talking about how I see my life. It’s not necessarily my life right now, but how I see it. It’s a pretty cool song.
“Right now, I’m just putting a visual together. After I watch it maybe like 100 times and get comfortable with it – because a lot of people still don’t know that I do music – so it’s about the way I started doing music.
“Once I had the studio, I didn’t have too many people to record, so I would always record myself. That’s the way I started working on it to get better. I would always let my close friends hear my music, and they’d be like, ‘Man, your music is really good. You should put this out.’
“But I was kind of shy. A lot of people would say, ‘You do music? Let me hear something.’ But I’m not the type of person who would just like freestyle. I’m more of a writer. I like to do music with some of my close friends in the studio with me. I just like to write, but I’m starting to get a lot more comfortable to tell people, ‘Yeah, I do music’ and that confidence in letting people hear it.
“It was a confidence thing for me, but I’m starting to get over that. I’m going to release a song one of these days and just shock everybody.”