Victor Axelrod

Biography

Victor Axelrod is an American musician, producer, and audio engineer from Brooklyn, New York. Since the mid-1990s, he has worked primarily in the genres of reggae, Afrobeat and soul, recording and producing under his own name and using the alias Ticklah. Axelrod became a founding member of Antibalas and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings after meeting musicians Martin Perna and Gabe Roth (a.k.a. Bosco Mann) in the late 1990s. Starting in 1996, Axelrod appeared as a session musician playing keyboards for Easy Star Records, a New York City independent reggae label. This studio relationship eventually resulted in him taking on the role of co-producer and engineer of the label's release Dub Side of the Moon, a 2003 dub reggae reinterpretation of the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon recorded by the Easy Star All-Stars. By 2002, both Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and Antibalas had begun touring and were in high demand. Being in both bands was no longer feasible, so Axelrod decided to focus his attention solely on Antibalas. However, he continued to occasionally appear on subsequent recordings playing keyboard and organ for Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Axelrod eventually left Antibalas in 2013. In 2006, producer Mark Ronson hired Axelrod and other members of the Dap-Kings to play on the Amy Winehouse album Back to Black. This was to be the first of many Ronson productions where he utilized Axelrod and this group of musicians. The collective appeared on three of Ronson's solo albums (Version, Record Collection, Late Night Feelings) along with soundtracks, remixes and special projects with artists including Rufus Wainwright, Lady Gaga, Adele, Daniel Merriweather, Lily Allen, Miike Snow and Erykah Badu. In 2007, Easy Star Records released an Axelrod solo album, Ticklah vs. Axelrod, continuing his relationship with the label. The record was a mixture of instrumental, dub and vocal tracks featuring Vinia Mojica, Rob Symeonn, Tamar-kali, Mayra Vega and Mikey General. In

Bio from Wikipedia