J. Dilla's Life After Death
Source: By Del F. Cowie
Posted: 02/13/08 4:44PM
Filed Under: Music
Two years after his death, hip-hop producer J. Dilla is still exerting a lasting influence on the music world, both through his recording legacy and his wide-ranging influence.
Detroit-born Dilla, born James Yancey, succumbed to complications from lupus in his mother’s arms when he died on February 10, 2006, three days after his 32nd birthday and the release of his solo album Donuts, shocking hip-hop artists and fans around the world.
Since his death, artists he worked with such as The Roots, Common and Busta Rhymes have steadily released a number of tributes on albums and on mixtapes and Mos Def recently hosted a big band concert of Dilla’s music in Michigan, the producer’s home state.
Countless hip-hop parties and celebrations of his music are taking place across North America this month -- including events in Toronto and Montreal -- but Dilla’s musical legacy, much like his own influences, extend beyond hip-hop.
Dilla’s mother, Maureen Yancey, was an opera singer and his father was a jazz bassist who was friends with Motown’s Berry Gordy. Additionally a young J. Dilla was schooled on using sampling machines by Amp Fiddler, a keyboardist in George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic band. Consequently, Dilla’s musical influences come full circle in his sonic legacy.
For instance, J. Dilla’s influence profoundly affected the recording sessions for D’Angelo’s Voodoo, one of the finest contemporary R&B records of the past decade. According to Russ Elevado, who engineered and mixed the album, many of the recording sessions revolved around recreating Dilla’s hypnotically soulful beats with live instruments.
“A lot of drummers study his beats because those drums are like references to how to really be funky,” says drummer Karriem Riggins. “He had the funk man, really. And he created a certain swing to his patterns that you can actually play live. It’s very influential.”
Riggins is more knowledgeable than most on the subject, being a jazz drummer who has played with the likes of Betty Carter and Milt Jackson as well as Canadians Diana Krall and the late Oscar Peterson. Along with his impressive jazz pedigree he’s also worked with hip-hop artists The Roots, Kanye West and Madlib among many others and as a friend of Dilla’s he was chosen to finish the posthumous release The Shining.
Riggins believes that Dilla brought an approach to hip-hop production that flew in the face of the conventional approach of hip-hop producers.
“Dilla just flipped it man to like ‘OK, this is a machine, but it’s gonna sound like Elvin Jones on the drums playing funk or something,” Riggins says.
But Riggins said that Dilla’s skill was not limited to intentionally sloppy drum programming and extended to all musical elements for the sake of authenticity.
“He understood every instrument and what position it would play in a band,” Riggins says. “He could manipulate the machine to play each part the way an actual musician would play it and that’s hard,” Riggins says. “Before him, I’d never heard it done before.”
Evidently Dilla’s approach influenced many others in the jazz world. New Orleans jazz trumpeter Christian Scott based a track on his latest album Anthem around a Dilla-produced track by R&B singer Bilal. Acclaimed pianist Robert Glasper is also a Dilla adherent who freely admits to changing the way he approaches chord arrangements because of the Detroit producer. Glasper included a track entitled “J Dillalude” on his 2007 Blue Note release In My Element.
“Dilla just was something totally different and special,” say LA-based producer Carlos Nino. “There was a real simplicity and beauty to what he was doing. He had a kind of a pocket and an approach that was really, really soulful.”
Nino, an important figure in LA’s music scene, is involved in a number of experimental musical projects such as the cosmic jazz project Build An Ark and is also the host of the Spaceways radio show on KPFK in the City of Angels. While Nino’s tastes in hip-hop virtually run the entire timeline of the genre, he cites J. Dilla as his favourite hip-hop producer of all time.
Like many others affected by Dilla’s music, Nino has created a tribute to the producer, but it’s not your average DJ mix -- his tribute unconventionally includes a wind, brass, string and rhythm section.
To coincide with Dilla’s February 7 birthday, Nino, along with collaborator and arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson meticulously created an orchestral reworking of “Find A Way” by A Tribe Called Quest, which J. Dilla originally produced.
The duo previously collaborated on “Nag Champa,” another J. Dilla production taken from Common’s 2000 album Like Water For Chocolate to commemorate the first anniversary of Dilla’s passing and got an “amazing response.”
The duo has already given other Dilla produced songs the orchestral treatment and hope to develop the project – tentatively titled Dilla Classics – into a full length album.
Despite the lack of obvious connections between orchestral and hip-hop music, Nino ultimately sees a marriage between good music regardless of genre and a musical link to Dilla’s hometown in the “Find A Way” tribute.
“Coming out of Detroit, if you listen to the superb arrangements that were being done for a lot of the Motown records -- if you were to think about those arrangements expanded into full pieces rather than just being accompaniments or arrangements for vocalists -- that’s kind of the approach we’re taking,” Nino says.
Nino’s project evidently would have thrilled Dilla himself, as he always wanted his music to be played live, according to Karriem Riggins.
“That’s really ultimately where he wanted to go,” Riggins says. “You could only do so much with a machine, but there’s endless possibilities with live instrumentation and he knew that.”
Riggins recalls performing at a concert with Common performing J. Dilla’s music live and remembers seeing the excited producer’s reaction.
“His mouth would be wide open like ‘Yeah! How did you do that?”
Funnily enough, the same question is often posed by others who are still listening to or just discovering J. Dilla’s beats.
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