Beats are life. Marco “Polo” Bruno, by way of Toronto and now making
his home in Brooklyn, lives by this mantra. In a few short years the
T. Dot native has gone from green producer with a new MPC 2000XL to
a highly sought after purveyor of boom-bap, laying down tracks for
the likes of Masta Ace, Buckshot, KRS-One and Sadat X. In 2007 the
gifted producer came of age releasing his debut album, Port Authority
on Soulspazm/Rawkus.
A Hip-Hop head since copping the first A Tribe Called Quest album, in
2003 Marco Polo was fresh out of audio engineering school and
despite sending his resume to over 20 recording studios in NYC, was
without a single job prospect in site. Unfazed, he made the move to
New York, staying with a friend in Queens before moving to his
current Brooklyn confines. One day while meeting with recent
acquaintance Ayatollah at The Cutting Room Studio, Marco finagled
his way into an internship at the studio. From then on it was grunt
work-fetching coffee, cleaning up, answering phones-and in a few
months he landed a gig as an Assistant Engineer/Manager
(coincidentally, the same job held previously by one Just Blaze). It
would prove to be perfect locale for Polo to shop his beats. “I
would have my beats blasting out of the office so that when clients
came through they would hear my stuff,” he recalls.After having a
hand in engineering records from the likes of Fat Joe, Talib Kweli and
even R&B crooner Carl Thomas, a Juice crew member put the battery in
Polo’s career after sliding him some tracks. “Masta Ace came through
a Beatnuts session and I gave him a CD and he hit me back a couple
of days later for the “Do It Man” beat that I did on “A Long Hot
Summer.”
