Visionary hip-hop producer J Dilla never found mainstream success during his brief lifetime. But in the eight years since his death, Dilla — who would have turned 40 today — has come to represent a major influence point on hip-hop’s evolutionary tree. At his peak in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he suggested syntheses that hadn’t seemed possible. He played fresh games with texture and tone. He recast the sample as a malleable component, rather than the monochromatic backbone it had seemed to be. And he injected a softened, swaggering humanity into the rigid slap of classic hip-hop drumbeats.
His magnum opus, Donuts, was reissued on vinyl last month, and the posthumous Music From the Lost Scrolls Vol. 1 came out on Tuesday — the first in a series of previously unreleased recordings. In Detroit on Saturday, the rapper Talib Kweli, violinist and arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and a handful of other artists will perform at the third annual Dilla Day, a concert celebrating Dilla’s career.
Dilla’s reach stretches way beyond hip-hop: For one, he’s recently cast a long shadow over contemporary jazz. He never belonged to jazz’s inner circle, but since his death in 2006 from a rare blood disease, his legacy has helped pull the genre back into kissing contact with modern popular music.
“He’s so important,” says jazz drummer Karriem Riggins, who collaborated extensively with Dilla and is himself a hip-hop producer. “Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams and Miles Davis: he’s in the same category to me.”
The jazz world today finds itself swamped with young talent eager for reinvestment in the discourse of contemporary culture. The shift has roots that run in a lot of directions. It’s a reaction to the neo-traditional revivalism that capped the last century, and to jazz’s withered commercial infrastructure in the wake of the 1990s CD bubble. Add to that the simple fact that millennial jazz musicians grew up listening mostly to hip-hop, R&B and rock.
The crush of these influences on jazz was a matter of when, not if. But no movement takes hold without a hero, and J Dilla has filled that role. “Pretty much anybody else in hip-hop — from Jay-Z to Kanye [West] — you can tell a musician you don’t like them and it’ll be like, ‘Okay, cool,'” says Kenneth Whalum III, a jazz saxophonist who tours with the R&B singer Maxwell. “If you go into that same setting saying you don’t like Dilla, it’s not okay for you to be there anymore.” He’s kidding, but only by half.
So what set Dilla apart? Why has his brand of virtuosity proved so captivating to the jazz crowd?
For one, Dilla was a sort of human musical encyclopedia. In his studio, he sorted thousands of vinyl records, many of them jazz, into specific sections and kept them alphabetized so that he could dig up the right sample as soon as inspiration arrived. He didn’t just rely on his collection, either. He was always ready to pick up a guitar or a bass, or saddle up behind the drum kit, or hammer out chords on the keyboard.
Dilla would happily wrangle split-second clips from albums just for the timbre of a single note, or the texture of vinyl, or the clack of a snare drum hit. “Every track he did, he had different drum sounds,” says Damion Reid, a jazz drummer who grew up listening to hip-hop in the 1990s. “Most producers around that time — like DJ Premier and Diamond D and guys like that — they kind of had a sound. When you heard a beat, you knew it was them because of the drums. [In Dilla’s music], I would hear that every sample, every drum, every nuance, every atmospheric sound was strategically placed. Jay Dee embodied, to me, the culmination of all those things.”
Then, there was Dilla’s approach to crafting the rhythms of those drumbeats. Many beatmakers use a method known as quantizing, which lets you perfectly subdivide electric drum-machine sounds into positions within a measure. From there, the pattern can repeat indefinitely as a loop. Dilla preferred to play beats on a drum machine by hand in real time. That allowed him to color his creations with a signature rhythmic sway: languorous, leaned back, landing just behind the beat. In some ways, it was a new paradigm for the swing rhythm that had been born in West Africa and grew up with jazz.
James Dewitt Yancey was born Feb. 7, 1974, and grew up as the oldest of four children in a household on the east side of Detroit. Both his parents were musicians, and he showed natural prowess early. In high school, he started making hip-hop beats and rapping alongside two classmates, with whom he would go on to form the trio Slum Village. By the mid-1990s, word was traveling about his production chops, and he was collaborating with artists in New York and Los Angeles: The Pharcyde, A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes.
In 2000, Slum Village released its breakthrough album, Fantastic, Vol. 2. But the year was more notable for the release of two other CDs, both by singers, that Dilla had helped produce: Mama’s Gun by Erykah Badu and Voodoo by D’Angelo. Marked by the unhurried, swirling fantasias that were becoming Dilla’s stock in trade, these records helped confirm the arrival of a new subgenre. It was vamp-driven, insouciantly seductive, happily lodged between the live sock of classic Motown and the tinkering studio savvy of hip-hop. The music was called neo-soul.
Later in the decade, Dilla would release a string of solo albums that stretched his hazy canvases to their fullest breadth — soul vocals and jazz harmony and rattling funk beats sprawled out together in a warm bath. These records, including the classics Welcome 2 Detroit (2001) and Donuts (2006), didn’t grab the spotlight, but they laid themselves out for posterity, and upped the ante for all vigilant producers.
“His music had that soulful jazz thing, but it also had a bounce to it,” says the rapper Common, a collaborator and close friend. “Somebody could dance to it. I think those records had a huge impact on the way producers thought about music.”
Just as he helped solidify neo-soul more than a decade ago, Dilla seems to be freeing jazz-trained musicians today to reconsider how their music might sound, and what defines it. Listening to the generation that’s come under his influence, you realize that some of jazz’s supposed fundamentals interest them deeply. Others, not so much.
The combustion of group interplay, and improvisation that can seem to tug on the boundaries of a band or a song: These elements remain exciting. But long, exhaustion-seeking solos pointed at some final emotional summit? Swing rhythm that clangs contentedly on the ride cymbal? Not necessarily.
You can also feel Dilla’s impact in the work of ERIMAJ, a band led by drummer and producer Jamire Williams. The influence reaches beyond the laid-back, clunking physique of Williams’ drum attack. It’s also in his ideal of a pastiche: strings and Rhodes and acoustic bass, and an electric guitar that might have been chopped from a Radiohead track. The band’s first album, Conflict of a Man, even includes a cover of Dilla’s “Nothing Like This.”
Saxophonist Greg Osby was on the front lines of attempting to fuse jazz with hip-hop in the early 1990s, when the idea was still green enough for incredulity and ridicule. Today, jazz musicians don’t seek a conscientious merger of genres so much as they use jazz concepts to reassemble the parts that have made hip-hop, R&B and neo-soul so contagious. Jazz training is starting to look like a competitive advantage more than a career roadmap.
In J Dilla — the musical archivist, the sonic poet, the bass knocker — Osby sees someone who has helped young jazz musicians square their belief in instrumental expressionism with their love for the modern blues music that is hip-hop.
“Dilla, he recognized this,” Osby says. “He’s kind of like a folk musician, almost like a pied piper, and he’s drawing in a lot of people with his assessment of a wider variety of material. Dilla will be like one of those Coltrane figures, where people will be talking about him in a legendary or phantom-like status forever. He was that experimental.”
Drew Mattiola is a third-year student majoring in communication studies. He can be reached at RM814408@wcupa.edu.
J Dilla is the John Coltrane of hip hop production. I’m glad you and I share the same sentiments musically. This man was a pure genius. His rare beat tapes are flawless pieces of art that I have scavenged for and when I finally hear them I feel like a child on Christmas morning. I remember reading in one interview that he actually listens to records for the intent of the performer to mess up whatever instrument they are playing and he then focuses intentionally on that sound, distorts it and creates a sound pallet around it which shows how eclectic this man truly was. He even morphed vocal samples so well that they said something different in the finished version than in the original sample which is very difficult to do. ?uestlove of the roots often talks about his freeform genius and I am always in amazement of just how unbelievable a talent he was with his variety. Overall fantastic read man. I personally hope that a new D’Angelo album comes out since last I heard ?uestlove was saying that it is going to be some next level Sly and Family Stone style funk. But for now long live Dilla.