Former record label executive Tyesh Harris, who has worked with legendary acts like The Fugees, Alicia Keys, and Cypress Hill looks to serve the African diaspora through the Brilliant Minds Collective.
Your entertainment career began at Columbia Records when you were just a teenager. How did that happen?
It is actually quite funny. My mother worked at CBS and her cousin worked at CBS Records. My mom used to bring home all sorts of merchandise. That was just a normal thing. My brother and I were always excited by it. One day she comes in and says that she has great news, “You can have a summer job at CBS Records.” I said, “Nah, that’s okay. Thanks.” She said, “You have to be out of your mind, so let me rephrase it. You are going to be working at CBS Records this summer.” That’s how I got my first entertainment job.
Having worked with numerous acts over several years, who were some of your favorites?
This is a really crazy tricky type of question (laughing). I have to be very careful in how I answer it. It’s like being a parent, every one of the artists is your favorite because they bring different aspects of themselves and needs to the table. For me, I have worked with everyone from The Fugees to Nas to Cypress Hill to Big L. I can’t really say that I had a favorite over the other ones. I loved them all. Each one of them had their own relationship with me in different ways that made them all special… That’s my answer and I’m sticking with it.
Describe some of the roles you have played in helping launch a brand or an artist’s career?
Once my mother put her foot down, I was really enjoying myself at Columbia Records. She told I had to go back to school. I had taken a year off. The question was, how do I go back to school and keep doing what I was doing? I wound up becoming a college rep. I became a national urban music college representative at Sony… At that point, a lot of people thought I was making super-duper money working with all these acts and I was making forty-six-dollars a week… Trying to break new artists. I started to get a lot of job offers and Columbia said if all these people think you can do it for them, you should do it here. I went back to Columbia, and I started the rap department, and I ran it for five years. I left Columbia and went to V2 Records… After that I went to Burbank, California and started working at Warner Bros.
One of the transitions I had to make while downloading was happening, I had to work with more product. In the music industry, the artist is your product. As we started to transition more into corporate partnerships, we started developing more of those types of relationships. People wanted to know if I could do that for their products. Another area I also transitioned into was the financial sector. There are many areas I worked in with many different product launches.
Share with us one of your most memorable moments.
That’s a tough question. I would say that one of my most memorable moments was maybe with Alicia Keys. Well, it’s a tie between Alicia Keys and The Fugees. The reason why is because The Fugees and Alicia, in my opinion, they were both the type of artists that the people in the building knew were great, but maybe their first project wasn’t what people were expecting. They were acts with musical abilities, and they brought that musicality into urban music, and it would cross over into hip-hop. They are probably two of my favorite projects.
One of the other projects I’d like to talk about is Big L’s. It’s a project that has happened yet… Obviously, today he’s an hip-hop icon. I think that he was really on the verge of being one of the greatest hip-hop artists in the world. That was another project that I loved.
We have witnessed hip-hop evolve, especially during the recent years. What are your thoughts on its current path?
One of the things that I start to learn is that regardless of whether the record company is putting the record out, an independent label is putting the record out, or the artist is out touring, the music is going to find a way to reach the people want to listen to it. And you can’t really contain it. It’s not like if you have a CD, you have a physical product that music can be attached to, it’s in the air and you can download it. With that being said, I think that there’s a lot of music that is going unheard that would be very helpful to the masses. Throughout my career, I have learned that the music that you hear has always been a reflection of the community… A lot of people will say why can’t music be more conscious… But if you really pay attention, you will see the parallels between the music being heard and what’s going on within the communities. If the community changes, you will start to see changes in the music you hear. I think that’s just the way it is. I am really happy with the music coming out of Africa.
You also work in a different sector that focuses on Black empowerment. Tell us about the Brilliant Minds Collective.
Thanks for bringing up the Brilliant Minds Collective. The Brilliant Minds Collective is a nonprofit organization that I started maybe a little over two years ago. A big part of Brilliant Minds was conceptualized in response to police brutality, but more so based on the response of Black people to police brutality. I started to see that when these things would happen to Black people, I would always see throughout social media a lot of Black folks asking, why is this happening? Why are they killing us? My thinking is that it’s been happening to us, and it didn’t just start. What are we going to do about it? We have to figure that out. We have to do something.
I started getting frustrated arguing about this and began to look for other people who are doers. I found two people and started doing calls every Saturday morning around 9:30, just updating each other about what we were doing individually in our markets. We were trying to figure out how we could help each other in our efforts… We started to bring in experts to talk to us and the group started growing. At one point, we realized that we had all of these teachings within the organization. It was time to do some outreach. Eventually, we had people who were joining from other countries in Africa, Canada, Jamaica, and the UK. They were all starting their own efforts in alignment with Brilliant Minds.
Be’n Original
