Culture & Community | Hamden | Music | Arts & Culture | Black Wall Street Festival
Top: Arthur Thomas III, Rashad Johnson and Aaron Rogers of The Breed. Bottom: Rebekah Moore, director of operations for The Breed, with the Rev. Lucy Fleming, who is also Johnson's grandmother. Tuesday, she remembered him being musical as early as three years old. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The Rev. Lucy Fleming stood behind a taut, lime green ribbon, her eyes closed momentarily in prayer. “We thank you for everyone that had a part in this gathering today, God, and I ask you to bless them,” she said, and the words drifted skyward. “Whatever they have need of, I want you to bless them, God. Bless this place, God. Let your angels come around this place.”
Cameras clicked in the background. A pair of oversized scissors waited eagerly for their moment in the spotlight. “God, you got a plan,” she said. “They got a plan, but you got a plan.” A chorus of amens rose through the heavy, hot August air. Fleming let the sun fall over her face. It was time to take a leap of faith.
Fleming, the assistant pastor at Holy Ghost Deliverance Church, made a sun-drenched parking lot feel sacred on Tuesday afternoon, as The Breed Co-founders Aaron “Y.A.” Rogers and Rashad “Snacks” Johnson opened Skiro Studios at 295 Treadwell St. in Hamden. A production studio, arts incubator and performance venue, the 6,000 square foot space is now open to the public. For many like Fleming, who is also Johnson's grandmother, it's proof of divine guidance and years of fierce dedication.
Skiro Studios includes two recording and production spaces, an event venue, and an educational hub for The Breed Academy (more on that below). It opens the same week as New Haven’s Black Wall Street Festival, which Rogers and Johnson launched with former Cultural Affairs Director Adriane Jefferson in 2021. Since that time, they’ve grown it to a day-long festival on the New Haven Green with over 250 vendors and 10,000 attendees.
“This feels good,” said Rogers, who started The Breed with Johnson in 2009, and folded in its not-for-profit educational arm, The Breed Academy, in 2020. “That’s what we’ve wanted since day one, just to get back to work. We’re just happy to be getting back to work. To get back to doing what we do.”
“We always traveled, but our families are here,” Johnson said, nodding to the years that took them between New Haven and Atlanta. “We're rooted in the greater New Haven area. We're born and raised here … this is our backyard.”
The space, which came together in under four months, is part of a years-long journey in faith and dedicated musicianship that started in greater New Haven, and is poised to continue here for years to come. Born and raised in the city’s houses of worship—Rogers at Varick Memorial AME Zion, and Johnson at Holy Ghost Deliverance Two on Mead Street—the two were church musicians before they were friends (Rogers still describes them as “church boys,” down to the Sunday services that they never miss).
They were always in each other’s orbit, but they weren’t close. Then a mutual friend connected them, suggesting they might bond over a shared love for music, and a level of skill in the field that came to both of them naturally. Rogers, who grew up in the city’s West Hills neighborhood, came over to Johnson’s house in the Hill. They hit it off instantly.
“We played, his beats and then my beats, for two, three hours,” Rogers recalled during a “Fireside Chat” with Johnson and Black entrepreneurship booster Arthur Thomas III at the studios on Tuesday. “And from that day forward, we’ve literally been with each other every day since.”
That was around 2008. The following year, Johnson headed to the Berklee College of Music, from which he graduated in 2013 (he credits Rogers, who told him that the two were done if he dropped out, with giving him the motivation to finish). Rogers, meanwhile, “ended up going right into the game,” spreading his mellifluous footprint to Queens and New York City.
Even then, they held fast to their New Haven roots.
“That process, where we came from, shaped us,” Johnson said. By then, the two thought of each other not as friends or colleagues, but as brothers. Just a week after Johnson’s graduation from Berklee in 2013, the two moved into their first formal workspace together. Within a few years, they were collaborating with major recording artists, from Joe Budden to Ne-Yo, G-Eazy and Chris Brown.
While New Haven was their home, they bounced between the Elm City and Atlanta, interested in the creative opportunities that existed beyond Connecticut. They worked to build their brand (“we build everything from the ground up,” Rogers said), with events like The Playlist that now draw hundreds of people. They tried out different studio spaces in the area, including in West Haven, New Haven and Hamden.
They never forgot that their faith and their families were at the center of everything they did. At some point, they realized that greater New Haven was where they needed to be in a permanent capacity.
Finding a space wasn’t easy, the two added. But when a realtor brought them by 295 Treadwell St. at the beginning of May, “we knew that was gonna be the music venue,” Johnson said. That business park is also the longtime home of the Space Ballroom and the Cellar on Treadwell.
As Johnson remembers it, he and Rogers looked at each other and smiled. “We just knew, as soon as we walked in.”
The facility, with burgundy and lime green accents woven throughout, is proof positive of that. Just beyond the door, sharp, tall letters announce the Skiro Studios name in clean black text, surrounded with accolades that the duo and their team has earned (the most recent includes a Grammy for production work with the artist Chris Brown).
Just to the left of the entrance, the first of two studios beckons, with a soundproof recording booth, sleek computers, and recording engineers at the ready if they're needed on hand. This, a sign explained Tuesday, was Studio B, a rental space fully designed with artists’ needs in mind. For The Breed, “it’s a launchpad,” the sign said, created to give artists the same kind of artistic license and freedom that has allowed Rogers and Johnson to soar.
Down the hall, visitors can find Studio A, the “soul of The Breed” where Rogers and Johnson can do their own creative work. Amid speakers, computers, mixing equipment and tech gear, a couch stretches out, instantly inviting. Tuesday, a squat, scented candle burned atop a table, its flame dancing. It made the room feel at one luxe and cozy.
Studio A may be The Breed’s inner sanctum, but the heart of the space is its performance venue, which is now available for rent as an event space. Nearby, a small room is equipped with 10 laptops for students in The Breed Academy, which David Burgess Jr. will be supervising.
Currently, Burgess runs music production classes for The Breed out of the Connecticut Center for Arts & Technology (ConnCAT), which he plans to continue. He is currently the executive director of The Breed Academy.
“It feels amazing!” Burgess said of the space. “It’s definitely surreal when you put hard work in for months at a time … it’s one of them things where you feel like the spirit is leading you.”
Tuesday, both Rogers and Johnson were quick to add that they don’t do anything alone. In addition to their families and their faith, both credited The Breed’s team, their realtor at Farnam Group, and several contractors who worked on the space (“We treat our team like they’re our family,” Johnson said. “They are our family.”). Without them, they said, there would be no Skiro Studios.
“It challenged our brotherhood, our faith, if we were doing the right thing,” Rogers said, later adding that opening the studios during Black Wall Street Week feels especially momentous. “There were a lot of questions we had, but we really really believe this was the right move and we're really, really excited to impact the community and the space.”
“We’re not just creating events,” he added of The Breed’s larger vision to expand in and beyond Connecticut. “We’re creating jobs, we’re creating opportunities for creatives. We want to show the artists that are here that to don’t have to stay here to be successful, but you can be here.”
The spot also marks something of a growing Black cultural scene in Hamden: Tia Russell Dance Studio and the African American Society 024 are both within a mile of the space. At an opening reception Tuesday, New Haven Cultural Affairs Deputy Director Kim Futrell put that in context, mentally mapping out the distance between Treadwell and Marne Streets and Manila Avenue.
For Stetson Branch Manager Diane X. Brown, who runs Black Urban Librarian Consulting and has collaborated with The Breed on Black Wall Street, the space’s immediate impact was even more simple. She sees Johnson and Rogers nurturing not just their peers, but also the next generation of culture-bearers in and beyond the greater New Haven community.
“This is the stuff I work for,” she said. “This is why I do what I do.”