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Andre Harrell, an influential hip-hop executive who gave Sean “Diddy” Combs his start in the music industry has died, according to several reports. He was 59.
The cause of death was not immediately known.
DJ D-Nice announced Harrell’s passing on Instagram early Saturday during a virtual DJ session.
“It’s the craziest thing I’ve heard,” DJ D-Nice told his followers as he dedicated the rest of his set to Harrell by playing artists from Uptown Records “It’s hard to DJ because I keep seeing these text messages. He started Uptown Records. If you don’t know his history, you should.”
Tributes for the owner of Uptown Records poured in on Saturday, with rapper and actor Ice Cube calling Harrell “one of the most brilliant leaders that the culture has ever produced.”
“We will all miss Andre Harrell more then we can measure,” the rapper said.
Rapper and actor Ice T said Saturday that his long-time stint on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” wouldn’t have happened without Harrell.
“Andre actually was the person the got me on ‘New York Undercover’ which started my relationship with Dick Wolf,” he said.
“Whether we knew it or not, he had such a huge influence on the R&B/hip-hop my generation grew up loving,” Grammy Award-winning singer John Legend said on Twitter. “He signed and mentored so many great artists, made so much great music happen, helped shape the culture.”
Raised in the Bronx, Harrell started his career in music as half of the 80s hip-hop duo Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. He became immersed in the city’s hip-hop scene and soon met Def Jam Records founder Russell Simmons.
He moved up the ranks at Def Jam to the position of vice president and general manager before leaving the company and forming Uptown Records in the late 1980s, where he signed notable artists such as Heavy D & The Boyz and R&B singer Al B. Sure!
But Harrell’s biggest gift to hip-hop was recognizing untapped talent. At Uptown Records he took on Combs as an intern. The future music mogul quickly became the record label’s full-time talent director and helped develop the careers of several R&B stars during the early 1990s including Mary J. Blige and Jodeci.
In 1993, Harrell fired Combs, who then started his trend-setting Bad Boy records with rising Brooklyn artist The Notorious B.I.G. before becoming a hip-hop star himself. Despite the separation, the two remained friends, Harrell said in several interviews.
Harrell left Uptown Records and became CEO of Motown Records in 1995, though he was fired from that position two years later. For the next 20 years, he helped kickstart the careers of several singers, most notably Robin Thicke.
Before his death, Harrell had accepted a position as the vice-chairman of the music television network REVOLT and was working on a scripted miniseries about the early days of Uptown Records with BET.
“I am thrilled to partner with BET Networks and Jesse Collins Entertainment to share my story, the rise of Uptown Records and successful black entrepreneurship, and the management and cultivation of some of the most iconic artists to come out of the late ’80s and ’90s hip-hop, R&B, and soul music era,” Harrell told The Hollywood Reporter at the time.