Fresh was born in Baltimore and moved with his mother to San Jose at age nine. He spent his teens going back and forth between the coasts, developing his talents on piano as well as turntables. "I tell people I started DJing when I was nine," he said, "because I was on them things, fucking with it every day." Inspired by older brothers DJ LS1 and DJ Dummy, who remained back East, the teenage Fresh joined 12-Inch Assassins, a clique of battle DJs featuring his siblings and DJ Chaps.

LS1 went on to DJ for DMX and more recently G-Unit, while Dummy worked with Onyx and currently DJs for Common. Through Dummy, Fresh got to perform at his first major rap shows, spinning at a number of Common gigs. By 18, Fresh was back in the Bay Area, only to be recruited by Nas, whose tours really put him on the map.

"The nigga just called me up one morning," Fresh recalled. "I knew it was going to happen, but I'm the kind of person, I'll believe it when I see it. He was, like, 'Have you done any major shows?' I kinda lied. My brother told me, 'Before you tell him what you want, tell him to make you an offer.' So he made me an offer I couldn't refuse. His manager called me back the next day, and it's been on since then."

"After my second tour with him, I went to school," Fresh continued. "I took that money and used it for my schooling over at Expression in Emeryville. The tour shit is cool, but I didn't want my eggs in one basket. I went for sound engineering — I learned a lot of shit there." Though many rap producers eschew such formal training for fear of losing their autodidactic uniqueness, Fresh is a prime example of someone whose education has only enhanced his natural talent. Check, for example, the mix on his 2006 collaboration with J-Stalin, The Real World: West Oakland (FreshInTheFlesh). The sound is spacious — huge — clean and clear as a bell, requiring technical virtuosity behind the boards. Combined with his knowledge of '70s and '80s R&B — "What I See," for example, interpolates "Strawberry Letter 22" — Fresh's beats immediately stand out.

"When I make my beats, I still got the DJ mentality," Fresh said. "Right when you hear it, it's catchy. When you doing a party, you trying to keep it cracking, keep it off the hook. I take a lot of old shit and re-create it and reflip it. Bring it back with 808s and claps and all that good stuff." While such music could hardly be described as hyphy, it was, in fact, Mistah FAB who first put Fresh on the map in the Bay, freestyling on a 2005 full-length in Fresh's main series, The Tonite Show (FreshInTheFlesh).

"It was before FAB had blew up," Fresh pointed out. "We had a song called 'We Go Stupid in the Bay.' It had a buzz, so that was my first establishment. Then he needed his DVD made — The Freestyle King. So we swapped. I edited the whole shit. That put me on blast more too."

Both the DVD and The Tonite Show helped fuel the increasing buzz around FAB's main album, Son of a Pimp (Thizz, 2005), a process Fresh hopes to replicate for FAB's upcoming Sony disc, The Yellow Bus Rider. A second FAB-hosted Tonite Show is projected for a March release.

This year promises to be a big one for Fresh: His gang of impending Tonite Show releases includes a compilation with his frequent collaborators due Feb. 23, as well as The Tonite Show with DJ Fresh, a mixtape-style installment of Fresh DJing his own music, slated for late February on Koch Records. He's also shooting beats at his previous big-name associates — soon to drop are Tonite Shows starring Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin, Nump of "I Got Grapes" fame, the Acorn neighborhood phenom Shady Nate, and even Nas himself — and he intends to start a production team, the Whole Shebang, with Jamon Dru, 10AK, and Tower, an extraordinarily deep-voiced rapper who's a cousin of Richie Rich. To top a furious schedule, Fresh has a radio show, running Mondays through Fridays on the first and third weeks of every month on , called The World's Freshest Hour.