2011 UMA Lyricist of the year Jesse Abraham was born in Manhattan as the first child to two public school teachers. He grew up in the downtown neighborhood of Tribeca, raised on the city’s hip-hop culture and the eight-track tapes his parents introduced him to as a youngster. At five years old, Jesse was writing and, by the time he was nine, recording demos on cassette tapes. The authenticity of his music now reflects his growing up in New York in the ‘80s, right alongside the groundbreaking hip-hop of Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys. He quickly developed an affinity for rhyming, wordplay and rhythm, walking the halls of his Hebrew school reciting lyrics by KRS-1 or A Tribe Called Quest. Between the ages of 10-14 Jesse lost his father, an uncle and two of his best friends in unrelated incidents, turning towards writing to cope with the tragedies. A published poet at the age of 15, Jesse suddenly realized his true passion was for hip-hop, inspired by such artists as KRS-1, Kool G. Rap and OutKast. However, it wasn’t until he went to college at Atlanta’s Emory University as a philosophy major that he began to realize that he wasn’t just writing lyrics, he was composing songs.
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