J Dilla’s music was an act of calculation as well as feeling; two legitimate but different kinds of intelligence. Some of his closest collaborators agree. As DJ Jazzy Jeff told me: “You can follow the method and you won’t have the feeling. You can have the feeling but no success because you have no method.” D’Angelo agrees that time itself can be both felt and measured: “You can do both,” he says. “Beat machines taught us that.”
