JUST JAY

Jay Williams — known professionally as Just Jay and DJ Just Jay — is a producer, sound engineer, DJ, and filmmaker with 35 years in the music industry. Born in Brooklyn and rooted in the Bay Area, he is the founder and CEO of New Hall of Fame Studios Inc. (NHOF), operating two full professional facilities: a music studio and a film studio.

His creative range is unusually wide. Self-taught on seven instruments — drums, keys, guitar, tabla, xylophone, and turntables among them — Jay works across music production, sound engineering and mixing, DJing, filmmaking, and color grading. His hardware-first approach runs through a deep analog rig: an ARP 2600 "Grey Meanie," Poly D, VC-340, Solina, UB-Xa, Pro-800, MPC Live and MPC 1000 (JJOS), a Neumann TLM 103 in a Whisper Room, Technics 1210s with a DJM-S9, and a custom dub station built around a Roland RE-150 Space Echo and Elk tape echo.

Over a catalog of 130+ recorded credits, Jay has worked shoulder-to-shoulder with a remarkable cross-section of hip-hop. Within the Wu-Tang universe he has recorded and engineered for Ghostface Killah and Killah Priest — capturing both legends' verses in-studio for Casual's "The Gift of Science" — with an extensive Killah Priest body of work spanning the Planet of the Gods and Psychic World of Walter Reed projects, alongside credits touching Timbo King, Tragedy Khadafi, Prodigal Sunn, and Young Dirty Bastard. He is deeply embedded in the Hieroglyphics camp, with work involving Casual, Opio, Phesto, and Del the Funky Homosapien, and toured 46 cities plus Canada with the Hiero crew. His room has also hosted rare summits — including Tha Alkaholiks and The Beatnuts together as the Liknuts supergroup, recorded live in a single session.

There's a deeper thread to that world. Long before Wu-Tang broke nationally, a young Jay sat across from Raekwon's brother — later the Chef's longtime manager — in a sixth-grade classroom, hearing the Clan's earliest recordings before the rest of the world did. Years later he moved west to Oakland, the city where he was born, and crossed paths with Killah Priest entirely on his own; the two hit it off and built a partnership that still runs today. A quarter-century after that classroom, Jay ran into the same childhood friend at a show, and the whole arc came full circle. He's careful about how he tells it: none of his credits came through that connection — every one was earned the old-fashioned way, through the work.

That Oakland chapter also gave Jay one of the most important relationships of his life. The late D'Wayne Wiggins — co-founder of Tony! Toni! Toné!, a Grammy-winning producer, and an Oakland institution known across the Bay simply as one of the town's own — was like family to Jay. Wiggins came through the studio not as a name on a credit sheet but as kin: he played the bass line and layered a twelve-part vocal harmony on Casual's "The Gift of Science," a record that stands as a lasting piece of a friendship woven all the way through Jay's Bay Area story.

His reach extends across the West Coast underground and beyond — Bored Stiff, White Mic & Grand Visitor, Mitchy Slick and Krondon of Strong Arm Steady, Sunspot Jonz and Scarub of the Living Legends, Chris Rivers, reggae royalty through Larger Than Life Records (Anthony B, Luciano, Bunny Rugs, Delly Ranx), and international artists in France. As a filmmaker, he shot Freddie Gibbs' early "From Tha G" video and has contributed visual work for Boiler Room San Francisco, including sessions with JPEGMAFIA and Tove Lo & SG Lewis.

Alongside his music identity, Jay runs a parallel career in corporate audio-visual production, with clients including J.P. Morgan, SpaceX, Gap Inc., and IDEA SF. He has traveled and worked extensively — India, Manila, the Philippines, Taipei, and across the United States.

Now Jay is building the next chapter through New Hall of Fame Studios: a fully produced Killah Priest album (every track produced by Just Jay) targeted for fall 2026, an official booking to DJ Hiero Day alongside headliners DJ Jazzy Jeff and Killer Mike, and a growing catalog of original productions released through NHOF. Can't stop, won't stop. ★