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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Charnas
Read between
February 1 - February 9, 2022
Over the course of the tour, Amp Fiddler needled Tribe’s de facto leader, Q-Tip: When we get to Detroit, there’s this kid I want you to meet. He makes beats. He loves you, and you’re gonna love him.
Q-Tip shared the demo with his comrade from De La Soul, Dave “Trugoy” Jolicoeur, when they played a show together some days later. “This is ill, right?” Tip asked Dave. “It’s like your shit,” Dave replied. “But better.”
Something about this gesture didn’t compute for James: a producer promoting someone who could potentially be competition. But Q-Tip was from a different school of thought: brotherhood.
“You took what I did and added sheen to it,” he said. “People gotta hear your shit. We gotta figure something out. I gotta get you out here.”
what Q-Tip would really become, for the next several years, was an evangelist.
“What the fuck is that!?” Skillz shouted, despite himself. “I want that.” And Q-Tip, in that same mellow mumble, said: “Yo, I told you. He’s ill, son.”
Q-Tip told him. Jay Dee. A kid in Detroit I’m working with. Pete said: “Stop playing with me, man.” And Pete thought: I am out of a job. I’m not gonna make no more money with this guy around.
Pete got James’s number from Q-Tip, phoned him, and said: “I’m flying out there to meet you.”
On a whim, Pete Rock had come to meet the young producer from Detroit. He left convinced that James Yancey was from some other place.
“Fuck that,” Tre replied. “That kick was perfect. We’re going to redo it exactly the way it was. We’re not changing it. That’s your signature.”
When Tre told James that he had a “signature,” he meant it in the same way that jazz players have distinctive approaches to their instruments, like how Grant Green has a different approach to the guitar than, say, Wes Montgomery.
Tre was saying that Jay Dee had a distinctive approach to his instrument, the drum machine. And Tre put his body on the line to protect Jay Dee’s rhythmic sense, a fact that was not lost on James Yancey.
James laid down the drums again, and the track stayed as he intended it. James would end up producing six tracks for the Pharc...
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Q-Tip hooked James up with a track on the upcoming solo debut of Busta Rhymes, who was so floored by James’s signature spastic kick drum that Busta altered his rhyme scheme to fit its stutter step.
Ali had never seen anything like it—James’s level of freedom, the speed and beauty of his execution. It helped that James was quiet and unassuming. He never got in the way. He enhanced things. Tribe accepted him as a brother.
For all his work on James’s behalf, Tip had never asked for nor taken a fee. But he did extend an invitation to James to be a part of a new production collective he was forming with Ali.
Tip and Ali had two other members in mind. The first was Raphael Saadiq,
Ali had been enlisted alongside Bob Power to help Archer craft tracks for his debut, Brown Sugar, which would in 1995 launch Archer as D’Angelo.
Together—Tip, Ali, Jay Dee, plus Saadiq and D’Angelo—they’d be able to compete with the rise of powerful production teams like the Trackmasters and the Hitmen.
As with A Tribe Called Quest, Q-Tip envisioned a crew in which everything they created would be credited to the collective, not to the individual. They named it after...
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Micheline admired Tribe’s integrity and parity as a group. Everything they earned from their recordings, they split evenly.
Every song that was written, no matter who wrote more or less of it, was credited to “A Tribe Called Quest.
When it came to money, however, the Ummah members who did the actual work would keep it, while contributing a small percentage to a common fund to cover overhead.
Micheline Levine found that James Yancey was a very different kind of client from Tribe, because his relationship to money was exactly the same as it was to his drum machine: when he wanted it, he wanted it immediately, and nothing else mattered.
what money really bought for James was the ability to create a world in which time, space, and people aligned around his primary desire: to make music.
The cars and the clothes were as much about putting him in an ebullient headspace for creating music as they were about looking and living large.
James announced that Slum would be releasing something on their own in the new year, and that he was happy that hip-hop in Detroit was “getting some unity.”
As James, now Detroit’s most prominent hip-hop figure, pushed back from the microphone, he gave a supportive pound to one of them, Proof’s white buddy from the Hip Hop Shop, Eminem.
In early 1997, under the aegis of Waajeed’s “El-Azim Waajeed Recordings” and T3’s “Donut Boy Recordings”—likely a nod to the donuts from the Dutch Girl bakery on the corner of 7 Mile and Woodward that fueled their sessions—Slum Village released their first album. They called it Fan-Tas-Tic.
Fan-Tas-Tic, the title itself broken into threes, presented Slum Village’s perfect three-ness: James a smooth, deep baritone; T3 a slippery tenor; Baatin the acrobatic high-end.
But they also had one-ness: while other rap groups took turns on the microphone, Slum Village often chanted in unison, staying yoked even over broken words and beats, their fused voices becoming another rhythmic element.
Tip and D’Angelo were rocking, they informed him, to the new Slum Village album.
Q-Tip played the entire first side of the Fan-Tas-Tic cassette over the phone for Ahmir, at hotel international rates, running up a bill of more than $300
Since he heard his first Jay Dee beat on tour with the Pharcyde back in 1994, Ahmir had become a superfan, collecting a library of Jay Dee tapes with dozens of tracks.
The album stayed on repeat in Ahmir’s headphones and on the Roots tour bus. He played it for everyone in his circle until his partner, Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, walked away with the tape.
“Beej N Dem” from Fan-Tas-Tic was a revelation: a completely lopsided beat, played in sixes but somehow counted in fours? Or was it played in fours and counted in sixes?
Q-Tip had a great deal to do with that circulation. He had initially bypassed Slum Village, the group, in his advocacy of Jay Dee, the producer. But Slum had matured, and he told James that he wanted to sign the crew to his production company, Mr. Incognito, offering to get them a major label deal with EMI Records.
When he stayed at Tip’s house in Jersey, what for Tip was a pleasant cocoon felt to James like isolation, cut off from all the things that fed him at home—his ride, his boys, the strip club, the basement.
Brotherhood, or at least Q-Tip’s particular conception of it, was alien to James. For Tribe, it had been an all-encompassing ethos: transparency, togetherness, consideration, deliberation, negotiation.
So when James went and did things on his own, like his publishing deal, he may not have realized that he was violating trust. And for Tip, it was about the trust, not the money.
R. J. had developed a bustling production business—including hosting sessions for a local ingénue, Aaliyah Haughton, and her producer from Virginia, Timbaland.
Regisford also represented the rapper Kurupt—whom John McClain had plucked from Dr. Dre’s camp and given a solo deal—and asked him to contribute a verse to one of Slum’s songs.
James and Slum Village already had the kind of goodwill that got them easy cameos from Busta Rhymes, Pete Rock, and, significantly, Q-Tip.
Leaving Tribe, losing Slum, the blaze burned away his disappointments and his attachments. I can walk away from Tribe, from music altogether, and still be happy, still be myself.
So when Q-Tip flew to Detroit to drop some beats and a verse for a Slum Village song called “Hold Tight,” there was no bitterness. Instead Q-Tip offered a benediction to all his brothers: Ali and Phife, D’Angelo and Busta; and a purposeful passing of the torch to a new group as he freed himself,
By late 1998, A&M Records printed advance cassettes of the album Slum Village was calling Fantastic, Vol. 2, joining some leaked demos already circulating among the small, devout ring of Slum Village and Jay Dee fans.
for James’s peers like Questlove and D’Angelo, already adherents of Jay Dee’s loose rhythmic feel, what they heard on these tracks was something altogether new, and something that would, and did, change the trajectory of their professional lives.
until James Dewitt Yancey recorded Fantastic, Vol. 2, no one had tapped the true potential hidden in these key MPC features: not to make a machine beat sound more like that of a “real” drummer, but to make a kind of rhythm that no drummer had ever made before.
Fantastic, Vol. 2 began with a new song—a tribute to the neighborhood called “Conant Gardens”—that employed the same deceleration technique James had been using on Fan-Tas-Tic.
The final ingredients in this rhythmic commotion were the most dynamic percussive elements of all: the voices of T3, James, and Baatin—syncopating, stuttering, breathing, using their mouths to produce sounds as well as words, using rhymes as much for their rhythmic consequences as their wit.
