Music

Hip-Hop to the Top

Local Music Man Works with Heart and Soul

Joshunda Sanders
Photo by Lori Eanes

In his state-of-the-art recording studio in Alameda, Michael Denten has been making hits across musical genres for more than 20 years. Bumper stickers layer the back of the front door like a collage and read like a resume: E-40, Digital Underground and, of course, The Luniz. (Denten produced the Bay Area classic, “I Got Five On It.”)
    Though he clearly has the Midas touch when it comes to soul and hip-hop, Denten has also worked with internationally known opera singer Frederica von Stade and gospel singer Walter Hawkins. Denten’s facility as a producer, recording engineer, music publisher and songwriter over the last few decades has earned him accolades like an ASCAP award and nearly a dozen gold and platinum hits for the likes of rap artists like Oakland’s MC Hammer and En Vogue, the popular 1990s R&B divas.
    You might expect a man with such accomplishments to be a bit haughty, but Denten is anything but. Denten, who was born in Oakland and raised in Hayward, is driven strictly by his love of the music—not his ego or material gain.
    “I love making good music, and connecting with people making good music,” he says during a rare moment of downtime in his studio. “It’s about that five minutes of changing someone’s life—that five minutes when they’re in the car and they think about something else other than the crap that went on during the day. That’s the beauty of it. It’s good to be paid for it, which is difficult for artists in the Bay Area, but it’s still all about the music.”
    Though Denten doesn’t come from a particularly musical family—his dad, who was in the Air Force, plays a little piano; his grandfather played the trumpet in the streets of Germany during World War II to make money for the family—recording was something he recognized early on when his father would record him and his sisters and send tapes back to their relatives in Europe.
    By the mid-1970s, when Denten was a teenager, he combined his love for the guitar (he got his first one when he was 9) with the recording bug and performed cover songs of all kinds, from country-Western to light jazz, around the Bay Area, experimenting with new ways to record and produce music along the way. Before karaoke machines were popular, Denten figured out a way to record background vocals and make his guitar sound like three different instruments when he performed at local venues like the Whale’s Tail in Alameda or Pier 29 in Oakland. Later, he started recording other people’s music during the day and performing at night.
    Denten moved from Hayward to Alameda because, “There’s more of a cross-section of humanity here than people would think,” he says. “It’s low-key and that’s kind of my nature.” Though he had been a performer since 1966, Denten says the transition from being onstage to behind the scenes was smooth because his musical foundation had been laid in the Catholic Church. He’s been singing in churches since he was young and enjoys it because The first recording Denten did in his new studio in Alameda was for the Our Lady of Grace children’s choir of Castro Valley, and he has also been a music coordinator, liturgical director and cantor/choir director at All Saints Catholic Church in Hayward, St. Joseph Basilica in Alameda and Our Lady of Lourdes in Oakland.
    While staying grounded in his faith and true to his roots, Denten kept experimenting with other kinds of music. He bought a 24-track machine before most musicians could afford one and built his studio from the ground up. Word-of-mouth publicity in the industry led him to work with the likes of the Backstreet Boys, Tony!Toni! Toné! and Club Nouveau.
    “With anything, it’s about where your heart is,” Denten says. “I look at good music and say, that’s our music. No one owns the music we do in America; people don’t own the soul we have, the pain … they don’t own the jazz, the fusion jazz. It came from the beauty of our struggles. I love that we can sing songs with soul, that there’s a soul to it because that’s where God lies … God lies in the struggle.”
    In addition to producing No. 1 hits and taking care of his dog, Cayenne, Denten is passionate about giving back to the community. He volunteers with local and national organizations so that the next generation of artists will not have to struggle to learn the basics about his first love: music. He raises money for both the Alameda Education Foundation and MTV Foundation’s Save the Music campaign because, “If you take away the artistry, people can’t aspire to be bigger than themselves.”
    Inside his unassuming studio every day, Denton stays humble and grateful that he gets to help people make music that changes the way people think about themselves. “This is the church,” he says of his studio. “My thing is, give me your heart, give me your soul. That’s what I spend my life trying to do [with artists.]”