Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm

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This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius' - QUESTLOVE

Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century.

He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years. At the core of this adulation is innovation: as the producer behind some of the most influential rap and R&B acts of his day, Dilla created a new kind of musical time-feel, an accomplishment on a par with the revolutions wrought by Louis Armstrong and James Brown. Dilla and his drum machine reinvented the way musicians play.

In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted Detro

But almost every other European “rule” about music was really a choice. The reason that the above phenomenon is known as the “octave” is that Europeans decided to devise a system making that higher tone the eighth step on a scale of seven degrees or notes. Europeans created a second tonal system, dividing this same distance into twelve smaller, equidistant steps. Again, a choice. Those choices—the seven- or twelve-note scale over even rhythms counted in multiples of either two or three—evolved over hundreds of years into a common practice that determined what Europeans would hear as musical and what they wouldn’t. In 1997, at another recording studio in New York City, the singer D’Angelo assembled a band to record his second album. In addition to Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, there were James Poyser on keyboards and Roy Hargrove on horns. The odd man out in this crew of young Americans was the London-based bassist Pino Palladino. What is a Dauphinoise Potato Pithivier? How Dana Accidentally Aced 'The Great British Baking Show' "Pastry Week" Technical Challenge But there were other ways to conceive of music. The Greeks, much earlier, had devised a ten-tone triangular system of harmony called the tetraktys. Asian cultures divided the distance of an octave into scales with five, seven, twelve, twenty-two, and fifty-five steps. I look at J Dilla as a man who redefined the word ‘innovative.’ This book makes you feel like you traveled his journey every single step.” —DJ PREMIER

J Dilla turned what one generation deemed musical error into what the next knew to be musical innovation. In this splendid book, Dan Charnas offers an uncanny mix of research and vision, documentation and interpretation, plenitude and momentum. Dilla Time is definitive. And exhilarating.” — MARGO JEFFERSON, author of Negroland

Dilla straddled a huge moment of technological changes in music production and consumption at the turn of the century, with the dawn of digital production. But he stayed true to the MPC for a long time, almost as if it was an artisanal tool... With this assiduously researched, stirringly told, and expansively elucidated accounting of J Dilla’s life as muse, mythos, and generationally transformative composer of hip-hop beats, Dan Charnas has provided readers with an alchemist’s cookbook of its titular, wizardly subject.” — GREG TATE, author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk The View' EP Shades Ana Navarro Over Her Costume Choice On Halloween Show: "You Don't Have a Heart"

The classically trained virtuoso Miguel Atwood-Ferguson grew up listening to Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin. He started playing the violin when he was four, began composing orchestral music at 10 and took up the viola at 12. The first musician he truly loved was Bach, but Atwood-Ferguson knows precisely what drew him to the music of James Yancey, aka Jay Dee, aka J Dilla. On the other side, surprisingly, was his mother Maureen, who shared so much. I think there was a relief that someone was finally telling the whole story. She was eager to dispel a lot of the clichés and false rumours that had grown up around him since he passed away.” Actress Bridgette Wilson-Sampras Has Ovarian Cancer, Husband Reveals: "An Exceptionally Challenging Time For My Family" Dilla loves five-bar loops," he says. "He loves sevens and elevens as well, but within the phrases of five, he will have different parts of the beat looped in threes, fives and sevens a lot as well. Two of my other favorite musicians, Billie Holliday and Elvin Jones, very naturally phrase in three, five, and seven as well, without even seemingly being consciously of it." Geek Down is frightening. There’s something angry and almost violent about it. It starts with a rough squall, tearing open the sky with a loop of drum breaks (the Jimi Entley Sound’s Charlie’s Theme) and wailing guitars (ESG’s UFO) that rub together to create thunder. Just 79 seconds long, Geek Down was Dilla denying his imminent death. It’s a moment of a man envisioning his nightmares, fears and anxieties and translating them on to wax. 9. Last Donut of the Night

Twenty years before the Roots became the house band for NBC’s The Tonight Show in 2014—placing them at the epicenter of the American cultural mainstream—they were an obscure hip-hop act promoting their first album on the road, opening for only slightly less obscure hip-hop acts. Most assuredly," he laughs. "Jimi Hendrix. Stevie Wonder. John Coltrane. The Beatles. James Brown. This is just the tip of the iceberg." There was definitely a lot to work with. I want to start by saying that it’s harder to write the stories of people who aren’t white, due to white supremacist culture’s resistance to preserving them. Related, it’s even harder to write deep, seriously researched biographies of people in hip-hop. There aren’t that many around. I realised that nobody else was doing this, and a decade had passed since his death. I thought, ‘If I don’t do it, it will never be done’. La ville du détroit is what the French called the place: “the village on the strait,” a fur-trading post beside a narrow, straight passage between two great lakes, founded in 1701 by a naval officer named Cadillac. One hundred and four years later, after the English took le Détroit from the French and the American colonists took Detroit from the English, President Thomas Jefferson sent an emissary there to serve as the Michigan Territory’s chief justice. By the time Augustus Woodward arrived, the entire town had burned to the ground after a barn fire, its six hundred inhabitants huddled beneath makeshift shelters. J Dilla’s rhythms were not accidents, they were intentions. Yet even the biggest fans of his style initially heard them as erratic. Why? Their reactions had everything to do with those rhythms defying their expectations. To understand the music of J Dilla, we must examine that process of subversion.

The Today Show' Anchors Go All Out For A Kellyoke-Themed Halloween: Savannah Guthrie as Taylor Swift, Hoda Kotb As Cher, And More What is remarkable about Suite for Ma Dukes is how relatively obscure Dilla productions like Don't Nobody Care About Us or Gobstopper have been entirely reinvented, the breadth and depth of his textures and ambitions highlighted by these new arrangements. Atwood-Ferguson broke down his chosen pieces into a variety of different elements, including the meaning of the song and emotional content. The melodies, harmonies and basslines from any samples used in the original recordings were recreated. Friends' Star Jennifer Aniston Breaks Down In Tears Over The Thought Of Matthew Perry Dying In Resurfaced 2004 Interview The Roots’ twenty-three-year-old drummer, Ahmir Thompson, was their de facto leader, with his trademark afro their de facto logo. The world would later come to know him as Questlove. But on this evening in 1994, outside a small North Carolina venue, he was an unknown.

Stream It Or Skip It: 'Mayflies' On Acorn TV, Where A Man With Cancer Asks An Old Friend To Help Him Die On His Own Terms Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lynch/Oz’ on Criterion Channel, a Film-Study Documentary Digging Deep Into David Lynch's Influences Noel Fielding Almost Chokes Up Sending Two Bakers Home on 'The Great British Baking Show' "Pastry Week" How our rhythmic expectations came to be is as much a tale of geography as it is musicology. Our musical expectations are governed by our location: where we’re from, and where we’ve been. So, before we meet James, we need to first take an important journey—from Europe to Africa to America—and on that trip we are going to need maps. In positioning J Dilla, a map of one place in particular tells us much of what we need to know. Dilla’s reputation has only grown since he passed away. How has his influence persisted when so much has changed?Questlove had heard all these terms used to describe the music of Jay Dee, who in midcareer switched his sobriquet to J Dilla. Chris Evans’ Cringey ‘Pain Hustlers’ Rap Is Inspired By a Real Rap Video Made By Ex-Pharma Executives The Gilded Age’ Cast: Meet The New Season 2 Cast Members, From Robert Sean Leonard, to Christopher Denham, And More Our Take: It’s one thing to listen to, read about, or hear someone tell you how innovative J Dilla’s beatmaking was. But in Legacy, it’s something wonderfully different when DJ Jazzy Jeff provides an audio and visual example by triggering percussion sounds on an MPC and illustrating the savvy of just where Dilla put them. (Onscreen animation adds the tutorial.) The revolutionary sampling and sequencing machine literally has a button you press to make things perfect, to streamline and crisp up a constructed rhythm. But as Jazzy Jeff describes it, Dilla took that machine and added a human element to its tech. He built imprecision into perfection – what we hear is how he meant it – and people have been trying to emulate his ability to do that forever. But there’s never going to be a “Dilla button” on the MPC. There are actually hundreds more steps to this whole process," he says, "but I will spare you them! To be honest, two of his most famous pieces, Fall in Love and Stakes Is High, I found difficult, so I plan to revisit them. They're not even close to the level of magic that I want them to be at."