Jazz Cartier

Jazz Cartier, born Jaye Adams, is a Canadian rapper from Toronto whose restless, genre-blending sound made him one of the city's standout independent voices in the mid-2010s. His youth was unusually itinerant: as the stepson of a diplomat, he lived across several U.S. cities and spent time in Barbados and Kuwait before settling back in Toronto, an upbringing that fed the outsider perspective running through his early work.

After a period of instability that included selling drugs to get by, Adams took his time developing his debut mixtape, «Marauding in Paradise», released in 2015. The project's brooding, aggressive energy earned it a long-list nomination for the Polaris Music Prize, a notable feat for an artist still operating without a label. He followed it with «Hotel Paranoia» in 2016, which also received Polaris recognition and cemented his reputation for dark, atmospheric production paired with intense, theatrical delivery.

In 2017 Jazz Cartier released the singles «Nobody's Watching» and «Make a Mess», the latter produced in collaboration with Atlanta hitmaker Mike WiLL Made-It, signaling a move toward a broader, more polished sound while keeping the moody edge that defined his earlier work. Songs like «See You in Hell» and «Black and Misguided» reflect the confrontational, self-mythologizing streak that has run through his catalog from the start.