Cult heroes: Marco Polo is the Canadian who defines the sound of New York rap

Let’s play a game of probability.

Imagine a young Canadian man, born in Toronto to a family of Italian origin. Imagine that this young man loves hip-hop – Wu-Tang and Pete Rock and Kool G Rap – and decides to make a name for himself in New York. Never mind that this is the early 00s, when rap has absolutely no idea what it wants to be, and New York has been eclipsed by Atlanta, Los Angeles and Houston.

But those odds are about to get worse. This young man isn’t a rapper – he’s a producer. What’s more, he specialises in boom-bap: the bass-heavy, gritty, grimy sub-genre popularised by New York producers such as DJ Premier, and already on the way out when this man was sweet-talking US border control. Furthermore, he’s not only heading to a place that has been home to some of the best boom-bap producers, he’s also in a place where almost all of them have moved on to other things. He hasn’t so much missed the boat as arrived at the wrong dock, on the wrong day, with no ticket.

What are the odds that Marco Bruno of Toronto, Canada, makes a career for himself? One in a 1,000? One in 10,000? More? Not that it matters. He beat those odds a long time ago.

It would be wrong to say that Marco Polo is solely responsible for keeping 90s-style boom-bap alive, but it’s hard to say what it would look like without him. Duck Down, a label that had been a 90s rap mainstay, was slowly going to seed until the artists there hipped to Marco’s production. He played a major role in launching the careers of rappers such as Torae, with whom he hooked up for a collaboration album, and he has a knack for digging up long-forgotten artists such as Last Emperor and giving them fresh life. He has produced for Masta Ace, Talib Kweli, Pharoahe Monch and KRS-One. A lot of rap artists talk about putting the whole scene on their back and carrying it, but Marco Polo is one of the few who could actually make good on that claim.

He beat those odds by being good at what he does. Boom-bap, at its heart, is exceptionally simple, relying on a few basic elements to make its point: thumping drums, some chopped samples, a speaker-shattering bassline. Part of the reason that it was a fading style in the early 00s was that it was so stuck in a particular template, but Marco brought an inherent musicality to it that it had been missing for half a decade. He favours short keyboard stabs and crisp percussion, and although he’s perfectly capable of chopping up a sample, he’s more likely to let it play out.

More importantly, he’s thrived because he’s consistent; if I’m being honest, it’s a little unnerving. Put two tracks back-to-back: a 2007 single called Nostalgia, which features Masta Ace rapping over gorgeous, light-hearted keys, and Astonishing, which came out in 2013 and hooks up Large Professor with Inspectah Deck, OC, and Tragedy Khadafi. Both tracks use the same template, the same production principles, the same vibe. They are unmistakably made by the same producer. And yet you’d never say one was older than the other: they’d be at home in 1992, next to a track from A Tribe Called Quest, as they would in 2015 next to a Drake joint.

The most frustrating thing about Marco Polo is that, despite his skills, despite the shot of adrenaline he’s delivered to the New York rap landscape, he doesn’t sell. On a track called Crashing Down, Torae went so far as to lament: “Marco Polo dropped Port Authority last year, May 15 in stores/ It’s almost May 15 this year and 7,000 ain’t been bought.” For all his talents, there’s still a feeling that he’s chronically underrated, that he should be a lot more popular than he is. He may have produced the theme song for the Brooklyn Nets basketball team – and it’s a mark of respect that they gave the job to a Canadian – but he’s still far from the household name he should be.

Boom-bap is still alive, but it isn’t quite healthy enough to propel Marco Polo to stardom. For now, he remains a supremely talented cult producer who will keep defining the sound of New York rap for years to come.