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Radio and event DJ Kelly J continues expanding her brand

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DJ Kelly J
Photo: Steve Marcus

During a normal year, Kelly Webb—better known as DJ Kelly J—can be found spinning on the radio, in the club or at private parties. But 2020 has been anything but normal. When the Valley shut down in March due to the coronavirus, Webb had to figure out how to DJ in a world on pause.

“When COVID hit, it basically froze everything,” she says. “The club side completely stopped; the radio side was closed for a while; everything else was in limbo. A lot of us went to virtual gigs on Instagram and Twitch and Periscope, [since] people were still looking for entertainment.”

A DJ at local radio station Power 88 (KCEP 88.1-FM), Webb says the station is now back up and running, with limited hours and programming. During quarantine, Webb found socially distanced events to DJ, like an outdoor Juneteenth celebration, a voter registration event and a local Bumble meetup.

“My whole point for being a DJ was to connect with people,” Webb says. “There’s an element of being a DJ that highly involves people. It’s not just music. Especially with everything that happened this year, it’s important to stay connected to people and what’s going on—registering to vote, talking about racial injustice. I always wanted to have that connection to the community.”

It’s that connection that led her back to Power 88, where Webb had interned at age 18. After the birth of her daughter in 2018, Webb returned to the station, and she’s been a staple there since.

Even when she isn’t DJing, Webb maintains her role in the community by sitting on the board of the charity organization Girls Who Brunch Tour (girlswhobrunchtour.com), a nonprofit that empowers at-risk girls ages 9 to 17. Those girls, Webb explains, “could possibly be in and out of foster homes, victims of sex trafficking or young mothers. We do this specifically for them, to let them know they’re not alone. They can cry if they need to, they can still be girls if they need to [and have] that element of youth and being vulnerable that’s taken away from them when they’re in situations like that.”

Webb, a member of the Core DJ nationwide coalition since 2014, also co-founded the Adult Swim Mixtape Tour, a Core DJ offshoot and summer event held in various cities across the United States. Like the Core DJ collective, which operates as a professional service to help DJs promote their music, the Adult Swim Mixtape Tour highlights artists and DJs across the country. Though this year’s live event was canceled due to the pandemic, a 2020 mixtape was released over the summer and is currently available online (instagram.com/theadultswimtour).

And as if she weren’t busy enough, Webb says she’s also in the midst of creating her own music publishing company and hopes to launch it by year’s end. But, she says, creative DJing will always be at the heart of everything she does.

“I try to cater to my crowd and the type of event that I’m at and create a set specifically for that,” she says. “You’ll never hear the same set from me twice.”

DJ Kelly J instagram.com/djkellyj, mixcloud.com/djkellyj

Tags: Nightlife, Music
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