“J Dilla Changed My Life.” Few rap producers have garnered such fervent underground esteem and accolades. James Yancey was a creature of habit. “Every day, no matter how late Jay stayed up, he rose at 7:00 a.m. From 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. he swept, wiped, and dusted every inch of his studio while listening to music, usually records that he had recently purchased, listening for sections to sample and manipulate on his Akai MPC3000 drum machine. He didn’t just skip through the records, “needle-dropping” for interesting parts. He listened to entire songs, listened and listened. His vigilance was almost always rewarded by an element deep within a track. From 9:00 a.m. until noon, he made “beats,” or individual rhythm tracks for rappers to rhyme on or singers to sing over. He created them quickly, one after the other, finished them, and then moved on. At lunchtime, he took a three-hour break. Sometimes he’d use that time to pick up visiting musicians and artists at the airport and take them back to his home studio. Then he’d work again from 3:00 p.m. until 8:00 or 9:00 p.m., and use the rest of the evening to hang out—go eat, go to the strip club—often returning to make more beats.”
In the late 1990s, Dilla invented a whole new style of beat making. “This approach did have a name. Between brothers, James and T3 called it “simple-complex”: If you listen to it casually, it sounds like one thing, something whole; but if you listen more carefully, you hear that it isn’t whole at all—there are many different things going on at the same time. It’s simple: it sounds good, and the rhythm is countable. But it’s complex: it’s really not a straight rhythm. It’s simple-complex…. As this predictable/unpredictable rhythm made its way outward among James’s mentors, collaborators, and admirers, they started giving it their own names: that “Jay Dee swing” or “bounce” or “hump,” designations that would shift to terms like “Detroit swing” a few years later when some of his protégés began using the time-feel…. That time-feel arose not from a musical scene, nor from the conservatory, nor from the avant-garde, but from one man using a machine in a basement in Detroit. That time-feel cannot be understood as either straight or swing time. It is not the median or midpoint or gradation between the two. It is the deliberate juxtaposition of multiple expressions of straight and swing time simultaneously, a conscious cultivation of rhythmic friction for maximum musicality and maximum surprise. It is conflicted time.”
Arguably, the golden moment for Dilla’s career was his teaming up with D’Angelo, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, and James Poyser—the so-called Soulquarians. “As the musicians bounced between Electric Lady’s three studios, A, B, and C, the lines between projects—Common, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, each paid for out of different recording budgets by different labels—were often blurred. They’d jam all day and divvy up the tracks at night…. The sessions at Electric Lady also blurred lines that James had drawn in his own mind. James saw himself as a programmer, but here he found partners who saw serious programming and serious musicianship as one and the same, and thus treated him as a serious musician.”
Even amongst those with years making hits in the music industry, Dilla’s skills in the studio were uncanny. Questlove simply called him “The God.” Dave Cooley, Madlib’s sound engineer, related another story about their first session recording together. “Cooley assumed James would have a heavy hand, like most producers. But James rarely second-guessed members of his team. Even accomplished musicians like [Karriem] Riggins tended to be deferential to the producer—asking James if he wanted them to do things differently, or record another take…. “Nah,” James would often say. “We got it.” James wasn’t being polite. When he said “We got it,” he literally knew he had every single bar that he was going to need for the final mix, and that he already mapped it out in his head during people’s takes. After everyone left, he would rattle off to Cooley how to compile the performance: Use take 1 for bars 1 through 4, use take 2 for bar 5, use take 3 for bars 6 and 7, but cut away halfway through 7 and go back to take 1…. It was the most eerie thing Cooley had ever seen in a recording studio. He’s Yoda, Cooley thought.”
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