walking upstream…
J Dilla
sourcesWax Poetics — Remembering J Dilla with Q-Tip, Common, Questlove and more (Q-Tip and Questlove's own testimony) · Medium — exclusive Pete Rock interview (Donuts' impact on Petestrumentals 2) · The Vinyl Factory — From P-Funk to J Dilla (Amp Fiddler on teaching Dilla and P-Funk's influence) · Cuepoint (Medium) — The 'Fantastic' Origin Story of J Dilla & Slum Village (Lollapalooza 1994 introduction to Q-Tip) · Complex — J Dilla Essentials Guide · Rolling Stone — excerpt from Dan Charnas's Dilla Time (Soulquarians reverse-engineering Dilla's rhythm) · WXPN — A brief history of J. Dilla and The Soulquarians (Questlove's account of first hearing Dilla)
James Dewitt Yancey grew up in Detroit's Conant Gardens on his mother's opera and his father's jazz-bass records, and by twenty was running an MPC in a neighborhood basement rather than following the manual for it. That basement — Amp Fiddler's — fed a tape onto a tour bus in 1994, and a year later Q-Tip had signed the twenty-year-old into The Ummah, the production trio that put his beats under De La Soul, Busta Rhymes, and A Tribe Called Quest itself. As Jay Dee, then J Dilla, he became the rhythm section the Soulquarians reverse-engineered by hand at Electric Lady Studios, a producer musicians studied the way other musicians study scales. He died of complications from lupus and TTP in February 2006, three days after finishing Donuts — an album built, near the end, from a hospital bed.
the sound in question
2006
WorkinonitJ Dilla
walk the tributaries ↓
Pete Rock1990s · Hip hop / Boom bap
Dilla studied how Pete Rock looped the Tom Scott sax line on "T.R.O.Y." the way a student studies a master, and years later, meeting Rock in person, he didn't dress it up: "I was trying to be you," he told him. Rock's own account of the moment he understood what that admiration had become was Donuts — hearing it, he said, "Boy was I blown away. I didn't expect to hear that," and it sent him back into his own instrumental records with new eyes. Dilla's early Slum Village work leaned on the same four-bar rare-groove loops Rock had made a language; what he built afterward, chopping samples into what one writer called "molecules of sound," was that language pushed past where its teacher had taken it.
listen: upstream & heresource: Red Bull Music Academy Daily — Life Is A Donut (Pete Rock's influence, the "palindrome" of mutual influence) ↗
1992
They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)Pete Rock
1995
Runnin'J Dilla
listen forPete Rock built "T.R.O.Y." around a warm, looped horn phrase repeated more or less whole — the sample as mood, not raw material. On "Runnin'," the Dilla-produced Pharcyde track from three years later, the same instinct for a hazy, jazz-lit loop is there, but listen for how the drums sit slightly behind and around it rather than locked to it — an early version of the loose, unquantized pocket Dilla would later push much further.
Amp Fiddler2000s · Funk / Soul / Neo soul / Electronic
It started with an open window: Amp Fiddler's basement studio had old windows that flipped up, so the music leaked into the street, and a neighborhood kid named Cricket showed up asking to come over. "Come see me tomorrow, bring your friends with you," Fiddler told him — and Dilla was one of the friends who kept coming back. "The next day I took all the samples and I put them in the MPC and showed him how to use the MPC," Fiddler said, teaching not from a manual but by feel, a looseness he traced straight to his ten years touring keyboards with Parliament-Funkadelic: "One thing I learned from Parliament-Funkadelic is that things never had to be so listed." That same freedom is what Fiddler says he was chasing when he first taught the teenager the machine at all — "I loved that about George's spontaneity, letting you have the freedom to be you."
listen: upstream & heresource: Music Origins Project — J Dilla's Basement (Amp Fiddler mentorship, "I was trying to be you") ↗
1973
Cosmic SlopAmp Fiddler
2004
Waltz of a Ghetto FlyJ Dilla
listen for"Cosmic Slop" runs on the loose, conversational interplay of P-Funk's live band — guitar, keys, and voice all pulling gently against the beat rather than locking to it. "Waltz of a Ghetto Fly," which Dilla produced for Fiddler three decades after that basement afternoon, keeps that same unhurried, slightly behind-the-beat pocket, but built from an MPC instead of a band — the pupil producing for the teacher, in the teacher's own idiom.
A Tribe Called Quest1990s · Hip hop / Jazz rap / Alternative hip hop
In 1994, Amp Fiddler was touring keyboards with George Clinton and sharing a bus with A Tribe Called Quest; he played Q-Tip a tape of his young protégé's beats. Q-Tip remembered the effect precisely: "It spoke to me as if it were a voice all its own, and it made a distinct impression." Within a year the two Detroit and New York camps had merged into The Ummah, a loose production network Q-Tip described as an attempt to get everyone's work out under one name — "we tried to form the Ummah" — though Dilla, characteristically, wanted his own credit apart from it: "Jay had his own wings," Q-Tip said, "he had his own ideas." What Tribe's own jazz-sampling, mood-over-showcase production had modeled, Dilla absorbed as an apprentice before bending it into something harder-swung and entirely his.
listen: upstream & here
1991
Check the RhimeA Tribe Called Quest
2000
Fall in LoveJ Dilla
listen for"Check the Rhime" floats a warm, unhurried horn-and-bass loop under Q-Tip and Phife's back-and-forth — the sample there to set a mood, not to be chopped apart. "Fall in Love," cut five years later with Dilla behind the boards, works from the same warm, jazz-lit loop philosophy, but listen for the drums sitting a hair looser and later than the sample underneath them — Tribe's mellow blueprint run through Dilla's own unquantized sense of time.