Jase Harley, from New Jersey, is a freelance multimedia artist who just happens to also be a classically trained pianist.
Combine that with a love for hip-hop and you get a creator whose music has had over 12 million combined streams, worldwide. He was an artist even before he started piano lessons at the age of 12, and his lifelong passion for drawing and painting eventually turned into a love of making music.
From here Jase has created Fresh Fuzion, a multimedia outlet, conceived with the idea of “[blending] different forms of music and art together”. Although he grew up listening to hip-hop, he was nonetheless greatly influenced by older soul, jazz, and the blues, and cites film composers like Hans Zimmer, and Ryuichi Sakamoto as among his favourite musicians.
Jase’s latest album, ‘Free Pxrn: The Memoir Of An American Heathen’, which he released in March 2016, was recorded and mixed in his Hoboken studio, which he’s owned for the past four years. ‘Between The Lines’, from the album, is, like every song he writes, a true story. He says:
“I don’t rap about anything that doesn’t happen to me [the song is] about the relationship between me and one of my exes.”
Loosely inspired by the 80s film ‘Flashdance’, the video for ‘Between The Lines’ tells the story of two young artists: Jase, a musician, and Olivia L Burgess, a dancer. The pair are in a toxic relationship and working to get by. It’s an honest and intimate portrait of two young urban creatives, and was filmed in Hoboken and directed by Ryan Metcalf. The video is a window into the lives of the two individuals, rather than a performance to camera.
You can find out more about Jase Harley online on his official website, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Soundcloud.