Music
The Remarkable Rise of Jai Nova
The London-born UAE-raised DJ-producer has a major label debut single out, a radio show broadcast around the world, and a celeb-heavy contact list he’s cultivated himself. Oh, and he’s 20 years old.
For a guy who has yet to turn 21, Jai Nova is doing OK for himself. The DJ-producer dropped his first major label single last month and his second, “Ride”, is due May 17. When we speak, he’s in Oxford, England, “working on the final bits and bobs” for the track, which features Dutch singer Babette. Nova creates all his own music, but says he’s unlikely to feature vocally on his tracks. “I can’t sing at all. I’m terrible,” he admits cheerfully. “I wish I could, but I don’t have the talent.”
He makes up for it elsewhere. So far, he’s taught himself guitar, piano and drums, to compliment his electronic music and production skills. Not being able to sing doesn’t seem like it’s held him back.
Even before his deal with Universal Music, Nova had dropped tracks that garnered international airplay, including on the BBC. And his own radio show, Novadose Radio, is broadcast weekly on 16 stations worldwide and has racked up over 9,000 Apple Podcast subscribers.
“It’s a crazy story,” he says of the show’s success. “I’m able to reach out to a lot of big artists and get them on the show, and a lot of massive labels send me stuff. It’s built a lot of contacts for me. I even get music from, like, Calvin Harris and Tiesto. It’s really cool.”
The fact that all this started while Nova was in his mid-teens living in Dubai makes the story crazier still. What transformed the 14-year-old bedroom producer of “a really, really bad remix of Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding” (Nova’s description of his first track) into a 20-year-old budding music mogul was a combination of fierce ambition, talent and — by his own admission — sweet naivety.
It was a family friend (“kind of like an uncle to me”) who first sparked Nova’s interest in dance music, with the likes of Fedde Le Grand’s “Put Your Hands Up For Detroit” and some David Guetta tracks. “I think I would’ve been 12 or 13 and it changed my perspective of music completely,” Nova says. “I completely fell in love with the genre. So I looked into dance-music culture, dug deeper, got to understand it, discovered new artists, and things just escalated. I started to learn how to DJ, and messing around with Logic Pro 9, trying to make my own music.”
All this was happening a little before the EDM explosion that really took dance music into the mainstream. And certainly before the UAE caught onto it.
“In the beginning, when I was doing dance music in the Middle East, it was kind of non-existent,” Nova explains. “So I gained a lot of traction because I was this one kid who was just super-ambitious and bugging everyone about a genre that wasn’t really big. So it started to turn a few heads, especially in the radio scene.”
That “really bad” Calvin Harris remix actually ended up helping Nova out a lot, he says. “I’m really ambitious and really passionate about what I do, so when I finished that, I was, like, ‘No one has ever heard anything like this in the Middle East. It’s gonna be crazy.’ So I literally sat there for a week, scavenging emails for clubs in Dubai and radio stations, and I sent it everywhere. I was a bit crazy to be honest. I was super-excited.
“But I got a request from a teen club to come and perform alongside Kris Fade from Virgin Radio and then another night with Saif and Sound, who was with Radio 1 at the time,” he continues. “That kicked things off, because they were so shocked that this 14- or 15-year-old kid was making music and DJing. In particular Saif, who then brought me onto Radio 1 and played the remix and then invited me a couple more times for interviews and guest mixes. Things escalated from there.”
Jai Nova
© Red Bull
The naivety that allowed Nova to imagine a national radio station might be interested in playing a 14-year-old’s bedroom remix also helped him start to build his impressive network of industry contacts.
As he tells it, when the UAE’s Radio 1 first asked him to prepare a guest mix, he had no idea of what the licensing deals were. So, having put together his track list, he set about contacting each and every artist he’d selected to ask their permission to play their track on the radio.
“There’s this Australian duo called NERVO. Their management team got back to me wanting to know how I was on the radio so young, and what I was doing in Dubai. They ended up connecting me with more DJs and radio stations around the world. I think it was that summer I had a guest mix on a station in LA with a celebrity DJ called Caroline D’Amore. That kind of blew up, and the station was, like, ‘We want to have you on every month.’ So I did guest mixes from there, and then they had me on every week, and then they offered me a spot on the station.” Novadose Radio was born.
His own music, he says, has shifted from the “progressive house” sound he began with (and which won him airplay on the BBC) to “pop-dance.”
“It’s got the radio-friendly side of things as well, but it still has those tropical dance synths and plucks and basslines that are more featured in the commercial side of dance music but also cater to a pop audience,” he says.
That commercial-friendly side is apparent on “Ride,” a track inspired by a four-day European road trip Nova took last year with some friends.
“We covered four countries in four days, driving,” he says. “France, Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. I gained a lot of inspiration because we were just doing the craziest things and going seeing concerts and just exploring Europe in general. The song was pieced together through each day.”
As usual when he works with vocalists, Nova was happy to encourage Babette’s input on the track.
“If you’re approaching songwriters and lyricists, they have the same creative mind as you. As long as I’m taking care of the production side, I’m very open to being collaborative on top-line melodies and lyrics,” he says. “I try to give them creative freedom. I let them do their thing, and then I might have some ideas I want them to try, then from there we kind of find our middle point and finalise the song.
“I’m quite picky,” he continues. “I want to find someone unique and different, and someone who works with the track. I have a vision for what each track will sound like, but once I’ve found the right singer, I’m a lot more open to their ideas and to having that collaborative process happen.”
By Nova’s reckoning, being in Dubai — which so many artists see as a hindrance — was, for him, a boon.
“Dubai was a huge factor in terms of being able to reach out to different people,” he says. “I was more exposed to mainstream pop music there, too, which has heavily influenced the way I produce.”
He continues, “My childhood allowed me a lot of experiences that not a lot of kids around the world are able to have, in terms of the opportunities that are out there.”
He’s making the most of every one of them.