If you have heard this superb collaboration, you have to ask yourself why it hasn't happened before.

After a 20 year friendship, Jesse and Mike — a.k.a. J. Howells Werthman and Baje One (from Junk Science) — finally made their first record together with 2010′s late release, What’s It Gonna Be? And if you’ve heard the results, you know how unbelievable it is that this stunning collaboration hasn’t happened before. Werthman’s instrumentals and Baje’s signature delivery combine for a cool yet captivating listen.

Yet our conversation took a different turn, from focusing on turning 30 to forming a record label, Baje and Jesse dish on the year to come and ruminate on when to call it quits. In the process, they laugh, get serious and discuss their modest hopes along the way.

SSv: You both said you turned 30 in the last year, so was that a traumatic event?

Jesse: I think you could look it that way, but it’s good to turn 30, I think. [Laughs]

Baje One: Your only option after turning 29 besides dying is turning 30. I didn’t think it was going to be the most serious type of event, but in the end it ended up being very serious. [Laughs] I thought it was going to be, ‘Oh, it’s my birthday. Whatever.’

It took a while to sink in, though. I realized I gotta do something and the one thing I’ve been trying to do since I’ve turned 30 is take the music thing more seriously. That was part of starting the label and finishing these projects and getting them out. I don’t want to put out a record every two years. I want to contribute as much as I can to music, and I don’t think I want to make rap records for the rest of my life. We’ll see.

SSv: What makes you say that last line?

Baje One: I don’t know what the legitimate cut off point for rap is. I don’t think we’re anywhere near that now. As it is, I have some more records on the way that will be out in 2011, so I don’t feel anywhere near that right now. But you know, is it weird to be 50 and rapping? I don’t know. I guess as long as you’re rapping about what you know.

Jesse: Yeah, some of our favorite rappers are just turning 50 now.

Baje One: How old is KRS-One?

Jesse: I think he’s about 50.

Baje One: Man, he’s the best.

Jesse: You have de la soul and others who are still rapping, so I guess it’s okay to do that.

Baje One: Yeah those guys set the rules. It’s whatever they’re doing. [Laughs]

SSv: Yeah, maybe they’ll set a trend for stopping as well.

Baje One: Mos Def already does whatever he wants anyway. He raps and sings and acts, so he’s already figured that shit out.

SSv: You brought up starting Modern Shark earlier, so I’m curious what the impetus was there?

Baje One: To be totally honest about it, we would have been happy to release the third Junk Science album, this latest one, with Def Jux and Embedded Music, but both of those labels stopped releasing records. That was no longer an option. Once I started thinking about it, I realized that my musical ambition has always been one thing, but in general, I’ve always wanted to focus on more than just my own albums. I’ve always been excited about my friends’ music. I’ve always had good friends who make music, so I really believe in a lot of that stuff.

So I thought maybe this is something I can do. I thought maybe I can lend my organizational skills to help get other people’s music liked more than just my own. I make music year-round every day. I would like to put out a record every year, but while that’s happening, there’s so many other people making music that we both know. So I really want to combine my own musical ideas with the idea of helping them.

Sorry this is getting long-winded, but there needed to be an independent hip-hop label that represented our idea of what hip-hop could be. We were never really at home amongst Def Jux artists in terms of their sound, if that makes sense.

SSv: Did it take you a while to figure out your own sound to then know where it would fit or not fit?

Baje One: We come from this community making mostly hip-hop music in Brooklyn, and we were always so focused doing exactly what came to our minds. We never really tried at all to conform to anything. Whether people liked it or not, we ended up with a sound that was pretty original. Jesse was making beats and Snafu was making beats. I think it’s just original and that people don’t really know how to classify it. It’s just hip-hop. It’s grounded, but it’s not too abstract. It’s not throwback-y and it’s not sucking that street battle rap shit. It’s just never really fit into a particular sub-genre, so I always thought it would be appropriate to have our own platform to release music.

SSv: Now that you have the label, do you have plans there now that it’s formed that you didn’t have in mind when you first started?

Baje One: There are artists that I really admire that I’m talking to now about trying to get them involved with the label. That’s another angle that I would have never been working on before. I would have been working on my own stuff or on my crew’s stuff. So yeah, now I’m having to think about how to expand the sound of the label. We just put out a second sampler tape, and I think that sound really is where I want the label to go. There are six songs with three rap songs that all sound totally different. There are two instrumental tracks which I think are very creative and innovative, and then there’s this guy, Safe, singing a Scotty’s beat [Scott Thorough]

I don’t want this to be another hip-hop label. I want it to be a little more diverse and I think people will be open to that once we can get the distribution out there more.

SSv: So Jesse, what are you working on in 2011?

Jesse: Yeah, I’m working on some instrumental stuff. I’d like to have an instrumental record out sometime in 2011, hopefully sooner than later. That’s just stuff I’ve been working on for a little while. I’m trying to move away from only making beats for rappers to rap to, but I want to also give myself more space to create things.

Baje One: Yeah, Jesse is a trained musician. He makes beats, but he makes them by playing his own instruments.

Jesse: Yeah, I grew up playing jazz saxophone and was trained in that, then I started making beats late in high school and throughout college. Then I got into sampling a lot, and I think you can hear that more in the new record. We’ve been making samples and compositions not just based on the sample, so I hope to put that out in 2011.

Baje One: It’s important to know that while me and Jesse are putting out a project, it’s really not that formal of a thing. I’m going to go hang out at his house for beer, and he will show me some samples he’s made. That’s the difference between Modern Shark and working with Def Jux or Embedded is that if we’re friends, we can just play music and talk about it. There’s also less money being spent on releasing these projects. [Laughs] It’s just a different situation.

Also, I know me and Snafu and Scott Thorough just made this whole record together. We made it so it’s Junk Science featuring Scott Thorough, so that will be out in the spring. Then there’s a Junk Science remix project, which Jesse is contributing to along with a bunch of people. It’s going to be a combination of new and old remixes and unreleased stuff. That will be fun to put the spotlight on stuff we never got to put out.

SSv: Jesse, do you hope to branch out into scoring some film or something like that?

Jesse: I’ve actually thought of that a lot. I’d love to put my music to video and be open to that. I just want to keep working on stuff, whether it’s producing beats for rappers or doing other things. I’d love to be able to open up other channels to do that kind of thing as well. Yes, that would be awesome. Instrumentally, the stuff I’m working on is being able to get music out there who could see it on different media. Sometimes rap can be a little limiting. People don’t want to necessarily hear it outside of rap.

Baje One: It can also be limiting in other ways. As someone who writes lyrics to rap songs, at times Jesse’s instrumentals can be complicated to work with because they’re usually composed with a lot of variations that are going on. I’ve never personally had a problem with that, but I know it’s been a thing he’s had a hard time with in the past. It’s not a beat loop over two bars that goes on for forever. I love that and I know others do too, but it can be hard.

*Photo by Ian Wolfson