(Article originally appeared in issue 5.0, “Underground” – Winter 2013.)

The man behind Universal Grammar helped bring Kool Herc and DJ Jazzy Jeff to his hometown. He’s felt the elation of a successful club run coupled with the sobering lows of watching fickle audiences grow disinterested in his message. Through it all, he’s remained a believer in the potential for the arts in San Jose, and past run-ins with tear gas and revolutionaries continue to inform his creative process.

When he came across the words “universal grammar” while perusing a Noam Chomsky text in the library, he knew he had finally found the right phrase to sum up his mission.

Though he admits he’s never finished reading the linguistic theory that is his brand’s namesake, he does clearly recall just what the words meant to him the first moment he saw them. They captured exactly how he felt about music and conveyed everything he hoped to present with his shows.

“I’ve always felt music was the universal language,” Aguilar outlines. “Conveying this universal message through art and music was my way of connecting to people, creating a culture for people on a universal scale.”

Aguilar, a local promoter and community builder 15 years into a self-sustained career, remains a key tastemaker in San Jose. He’s brought Questlove, Talib Kweli and Little Dragon to town, but many may not know that his favorite events were actually literary—engagements with authors Jeff Chang and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz. He may be dealing with The Fairmont now, but don’t think that his activist mindset, molded by a West Valley College educator, has worn off.

Born and raised on San Jose’s Eastside, Aguilar’s passion for music emerged through hip-hop. He didn’t need to look far to build his obsession with beats and rhymes, as Star Records, a key South Bay music destination at the time, was located just down the street. He was among the kids who would hang out in front of the store, hoping to snag an autograph from the rappers who happened to pull up. Among those early visitors were the Fat Boys, Masta Ace, and Biz Markie. After years of haunting the premises, his dream came true when he landed a job at the record shop in his teens.

“I’VE ALWAYS FELT MUSIC WAS THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE.”

Drawing from a stable of rapper friends and an obsession with L.A. underground hip-hop, Aguilar put on his first show at West Valley College in 1998. The event was a hit, even though Aguilar admits he had no idea how to put on a show at the time. He organized two more shows in successive years. While planning for his fourth, Aguilar received a call from, in his words, “another institution I had always revered from afar”: MACLA. They asked him to present a vision for a show in their space.

“I wrote something up, a vision statement basically,” Aguilar recalls. “I wanted to do an art and music event for younger folks downtown. At the time, it was unprecedented. There was nothing else going on that hit that audience.”

The Director of Programming loved his proposal, and his event featured several graffiti artists who have gone on to further national and local success. It was a runaway hit for both him and MACLA, and after a continued string of success in the space, he was given the opportunity to rent out the MACLA facilities to people like himself. The job started a partnership with MACLA that lasted for close to a decade.

Aguilar’s artistic vision always measures out context and historical significance. He recognizes a need to honor music’s legacy while looking forward at the same time—upcoming tributes to both James Brown and hip-hop production duo the Neptunes are great examples of this dynamic. It’s a notion he feels is being lost on the next generation. “You can’t go forward without knowing your past, and I think that’s lax in music today,” he says. “A lot of young kids, they love their EDM, but they don’t know the roots of it. They don’t know that techno and house were created by African Americans in Chicago and Detroit.” As he knows, music only tells half the story, and the crowded shelves in his room, packed full of anthologies and artist biographies, reveal his investment in that spirit.

His stint at MACLA led to an interest in entering the nightlife scene, and a partnership with Agenda Lounge soon developed. With his business partner, he created a night called Stank. Word spread through his well-designed flyers, and in his watershed summer of 2003, he was able to book both ?uestlove, drummer and leader of hip-hop group the Roots, and the legendary DJ Jazzy Jeff. These shows ushered in the Serato era for deejays in the South Bay. By September, carrying records into a club was obsolete.

An overlooked key to Aguilar’s outlook and approach to programming remains his involvement in the 1999 WTO globalization protests. West Valley paid for him and a few other students to fly to Seattle to take part in the events firsthand. He didn’t tell his parents why he was headed to Seattle. When they found out, they demanded he come home, but he relented. His choice was the full realization of the progressive ideals he had learned from educator Tom Moniz, whose classes at West Valley taught Aguilar to become more politically active. “I had to be directly active in this movement,” remembers Aguilar. “I didn’t want to read it from a book. I didn’t want to look at it in a paper from afar and be like ‘I support that. I’m about that.’ I wanted to be that.”

When he returned, Aguilar’s emerging political beliefs continued to stir up issues with his father, a former Vietnam vet who served in the Army. He once recalls hanging the American flag upside down in his room, which his father tore down later that day. He offered an ultimatum: hang up the flag like that again, and you’re out of the house.

Though his Universal Grammar mission rolls on, his parents and girlfriend still urge him to find more stable work. The lows of his line of work remain vivid. He still remembers the fallout from his runs at Agenda and Voodoo well. “That’s the thing about being promoters,” he admits, “You book a show and sometimes you can lose your ass. It keeps you underneath for a while.” But Universal Grammar is about much more than just entertainment. It’s about offering thoughtful, compelling content that speaks to others and celebrates the potential for change that art and music pose for the world at large. It’s work he almost considers a duty.

When asked why he has decided to remain in San Jose despite the ups and downs it’s presented him over the years, Aguilar doesn’t hesitate to respond. “Why am I not in LA and San Francisco doing what I’m trying to do here in San Jose? Because those cities don’t need it.” His activist self takes the forefront once more —the battleground for change remains in the heart of Silicon Valley. “San Jose needs it. That’s where the work is needed most.”

Most recently, Aguilar has been celebrated for his curatorial vision at The Pagoda, a former restaurant located inside the Fairmont Hotel. It’s a space he

has been able to shape creatively through his “Live at The Pagoda” series, a name locals have come to rely on as a co-sign for progressive artistry, regardless of name recognition. The Fairmont has taken note of Aguilar’s success with the series, and they are in talks with him to bring his programming to other hotels. With the right act, he may even be able to construct a Fairmont tour.

The irony of now being aligned with an entity like The Fairmont is not lost on Aguilar, but he maintains his approach to programming remains the same.

“Obviously, now, I’m at The Fairmont, and it’s a corporate situation,” he admits. “But I feel like I’m still being revolutionary in [my] thought process. I think that’s stayed with me.”

Though he’s been successful with his programming at The Pagoda, a venue that’s essentially allowed him to curate his own content, he admits there’s still a ceiling involved with the partnership. To program fully on his terms, Aguilar knows he needs his own venue, but finding that room in San Jose, one with state-of-the-art sound and lighting is another task altogether. Aguilar remembers a close call back in ’04, when that room almost had a chance to be born.

Along with Chris Esparza and Brendan Rawson, both longtime mentors, Aguilar was considering a spot in Japantown in the space that’s currently State of Grace Tattoo. They had the money to invest in state-of-the-art sound and lighting, but after fire regulations shut down the thriving Sofa Lounge, a similar upstairs space, that same year, the three knew their budget would be lost on retrofitting before they’d even have a chance to install the sound and lighting they needed. Since then, the search has continued.

“Where is it?” he asks rhetorically. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

With work still, to be done in his hometown, Aguilar trudges on with his eyes on potential spaces, hoping to one day fully construct a room where he can continually present acts that speak to the feet as well as the heart. Maybe then his mission will be accomplished.

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