Bay Area producer & composer · 15+ years in the studio.
DJ Smalls is a Bay Area music producer and composer with over 15 years of production experience, building a catalog that lives at the intersection of hip hop, R&B, afrobeats, and cinematic film scoring.
The DJ Smalls sound is a fusion of hip hop and rap foundations layered with R&B and soul sensibilities, afrobeats rhythms from Nigeria and Ghana, flashes of 80s synthwave, and the textural language of film music. That blend is deliberate. It's what lets a beat work on a streaming single and in a film cue in the same week, and it's why artists across genres keep reaching for the catalog instead of another template pack.
DJ Smalls composed the score for Micah Watson's documentary 40TH and State, which was a 2018 official selection of the BlackStar Film Festival, won Best Documentary at Black Web Fest in 2019, and screened at MOCA in Los Angeles, McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, and TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto.
Beyond that single project, DJ Smalls' music has been licensed for television shows across multiple countries, with placements that have put the catalog in front of global audiences in contexts ranging from reality programming to scripted drama. The work has also extended into theater and visual art: writing the music and sound design for the Black Monologues production at the University of Virginia in 2017, and curating original compositions for contemporary artist Uzo Njoku's campaigns in 2020 and 2021.
As an artist, DJ Smalls has released a catalog of EPs spanning beat tapes, cinematic instrumentals, and global rhythms, including Reflections (2025), Havana (2022), Tour de Force (2021), and Ethereal (2021). Every release is an extension of the same philosophy that drives the beat catalog: fusion over formula, craft over templates, records that feel like something instead of sounding like everything else.