CRATES & KEYS: Where Classic Tracks Meet Live Improvisation (With a Side of Culture & Community)

Crates & Keys: Where Classic Tracks Meet Live Improvisation

In a nightlife landscape increasingly driven by trends and algorithms, Crates & Keys offers something rarer: a space where music is treated as culture, conversation, and shared experience. Curated by GMS and Entrfied, the monthly lounge event brings together DJs, live musicians, vocalists, and visual artists for a night rooted in listening, feeling, and connection.

While hip-hop’s values — digging, improvisation, respect for lineage — inform the spirit of Crates & Keys, the sound itself is expansive. The music moves freely across eras and styles: soul, funk, neo-soul, classic dance records, house, Motown, ’80s staples, R&B, and timeless cuts that shaped dance floors long before streaming playlists existed.

This is not genre-hopping for novelty’s sake. It’s storytelling through sound.

The Alchemy Behind the Sound

At the heart of Crates & Keys is a real-time musical conversation.

GMS sets the tone, guiding the night through carefully chosen records that establish mood, momentum, and emotional range. His selections aren’t just songs — they’re starting points. Each record opens a door.

From there, Entrfied — the God of Sound takes the music somewhere new.

A musical savant and accomplished jazz, funk, and soul pianist, Entrfied is equally fluent as an MC and hip-hop producer. As GMS drops a track, Entrfied listens, locks in, and begins playing along — reinterpreting basslines, adding keys, stretching harmonies, and improvising melodies live in the moment.

Using Serato Stems technology, GMS then removes elements from the original recording — stripping away basslines, keys, or drums — creating space for Entrfied’s live performance to fully replace and reimagine the record. What begins as a familiar classic transforms into something singular, unfolding in real time.

No two moments are ever the same.

D Cross the Artist

Adding another layer to this sonic dialogue is D Cross the Artist — a vocal percussionist and verbal turntablist who treats his voice like an instrument. D Cross creates scratches, cuts, rhythms, and textures vocally, sometimes replacing the drums of a record entirely with his own beatbox patterns. His presence blurs the line between DJ culture, live performance, and pure invention.

Beyond sound, D Cross is also a visual artist. His mixed-media paintings have been showcased at Crates & Keys, and the curators continue to feature visual artists alongside the musical journeys — reinforcing the idea that this is a space where multiple art forms coexist and inform one another.

The Curators Behind Crates & Keys

At the center of Crates & Keys are two artists whose paths naturally converge at the intersection of records, musicianship, and culture.

Entrfied brings a deep musicality to the room that goes far beyond accompaniment. A gifted jazz, funk, and soul pianist, he is equally at home as an MC and hip-hop producer — a rare combination that allows him to move fluidly between harmony, rhythm, and language. He has been part of the Black Yacht Rock Club collective and has collaborated with artists such as SupaNova Slom and other forward‑thinking musicians working across genres. In addition to his collaborative work, Entrfied performs as part of GZA of Wu‑Tang Clan’s live band The Phunky Nomads, bringing improvisational musicianship to one of hip‑hop’s most revered catalogs. That same sensibility — respect for legacy paired with fearless reinvention — defines his role at Crates & Keys.

GMS, meanwhile, is a longtime fixture in the NYC underground hip‑hop scene. Known for his work with the group HYDRA, his crew The Plague, and the MCMI brand he runs alongside LR Blitzkrieg, GMS’s roots extend well beyond the DJ booth. It is known that he works as a NYC Public School teacher and teaches Middle School students coding, music production, video editing and Financial Literacy. In 2022 he dropped a song and video called TEACHER feat Bamboo. Less widely known is his lifelong training as a jazz flautist and pianist, shaped by growing up around music from an early age — his father being a notable jazz pianist and co‑owner of Slope Music, a respected Park Slope music school. GMS also plays additional instruments, and that foundation informs everything he does as a DJ and producer.

It was from this dual background — instrumental performance and hip‑hop production — that the idea for Crates & Keys was born. GMS envisioned a space where those worlds could coexist naturally, where DJs and musicians could interact in real time, and where songs could be rebuilt rather than simply replayed. He knew immediately that Entrfied was the ideal artist to anchor the “Keys” side of that vision.

What happens next often feels less like a set and more like a live remix session. Musicians, MCs, and singers regularly sit in, responding to the energy of the room as familiar records are reshaped on the spot. The result is something both recognizable and new — classic songs transformed in real time, guided by trust, listening, and shared musical language.

A Room That Feels Like Community

Equally important is the room itself. Crates & Keys attracts a multigenerational crowd: artists, dancers, longtime music heads, and people simply looking for something more soulful than the average night out. There’s no rigid line between performer and audience. Conversations spark. Collaborations happen. Visual art lives on the walls.

It feels less like an event you attend and more like a place you return to.

A Celebration Within the Sound

This upcoming edition of Crates & Keys carries added meaning. It doubles as a birthday celebration for GMS and the live screening of a new music video, premiering in the space before it appears anywhere else. True to the ethos of the night, the release becomes a shared moment rather than a passive drop.

Why Crates & Keys Resonates

Crates & Keys works because it honors the past without living in it, embraces experimentation without losing warmth, and centers people as much as sound. It’s rooted in hip-hop’s sense of intention and community, but it opens the doors wide — to soul lovers, dancers, crate diggers, live music fans, and anyone who believes music should be felt, not rushed.

In a city full of noise, Crates & Keys offers something enduring: a place where classic tracks meet live improvisation — and where people come together because of it.

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