Donuts by J Dilla
J Dilla, may God rest his soul, has had a quiet hand in everything from A Tribe Called Quest to De La Soul, Common to Busta Rhymes, Erykah Badu to Talib Kweli. You may not have heard of J Dilla but you've heard him. He is a mastermind hip hop producer.
J Dilla, also known as Jay Dee, is from Detroit just around the block from Emenim. The son of an opera singer and a jazz bassist he found a love for music at an early age and started collecting vinyl. In fact, in almost every picture I've seen of Dilla he is surrounded by obscene amounts of vinyl. He has tried his hand at rapping, DJing and producing and did quite well with all, but producing was his real talent.
The album Donuts is an instrumental album that was mostly made in a hospital room. It was released in 2006, 3 days before J Dilla died of a rare blood disease called TTP. At the time Dilla was steadily gaining popularity but most of his success was unfortunately postmortem. He inhabited a strange basement corner of hip hop not unlike Madlib, but both of these producers have made hip hop astoundingly more interesting, creative and down right weird.
Donuts is an album of mini masterpieces with songs not usually longer than a couple of minutes. Although sampling has been done countless times over the years it's never sounded quite like this. Dilla takes an old dusty record, blows it off, cleans it up, adds a few samples and beats and gives you a polished unique song. The samples are drawn heavily from old soul records and they have all kinds of groove, tremolo, and guts but they sound 100% fresh today. J Dilla was among the most prolific producers and has left behind a long line of work to be released in the future, which I very much look forward to.
9.0/10 By Chris L.
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