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

by Dan Charnas

This was the way music evolved; old rules need to get broken so new things can rise.

J Dilla took all the pieces of the city’s history, put them into his machine, and—as one can do only with a machine—slammed them against one another. Grid against grid.

The genius of Dilla was that you never knew when that resolution would come. For Moran, and for many in his generation of jazz like Glasper, that sensation felt good.

Dane Orr and Anna Wise were calling themselves Sonnymoon, and in their demos, Ellis heard so many of the ideas they had studied being put to work. He wondered where his students might take them.

Steven Ellison, a Stones Throw intern, an unabashed Dilla fan, and the grandnephew of Alice Coltrane, had begun producing his own music under the moniker Flying Lotus;

the launch point for new producers, including Jason Chung, performing as Nosaj Thing, and Glen Boothe, producing under the moniker Knxwledge. Artists like Thundercat and Berklee–Dilla Ensemble alumni Sonnymoon took the stage.

After collaborating with labelmates Slum Village, former Death Row rapper Kurupt became a champion of Jay Dee’s sound.

In the next decade, an exuberant young protégé of Battlecat’s named Terrace Martin would help orchestrate the ultimate Dilla-inspired convergence of beats and musicality in Los Angeles.

studying saxophone at Santa Monica’s renowned music program at Locke High School, alongside his cousin, Steven “Thundercat” Bruner.

Martin’s chops got him to a congress of all-star high school jazz bands in Colorado, where he befriended a teenage pianist from Texas named Robert Glasper.

He and Thundercat played in Snoop Dogg’s backing band, the Snoopadelics, alongside Thundercat’s childhood friend, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington.

Kendrick Lamar, like Martin, saw himself as a product of his neighborhood, but also as part of a greater community and a longer lineage.

And as he grew more confident in his abilities, he began to seek harmonies and rhythms that matched his verbal and psychological complexity.

Terrace Martin produced Kendrick Lamar’s first demo, put a song on his debut album, and enthused about him to his musician friends.

Blown away by Kendrick’s musicality, Robert Glasper asked Martin to connect him with the rapper to be a guest on his breakthrough Black Radio LP.

Martin contributed a couple of tracks on Kendrick Lamar’s second album, released on Dr. Dre’s Aftermath ...

Lamar made a trusted contributor out of Sonnymoon’s Anna Wise, whom he tapped to add vocals to a number of songs, including his ...

Lamar drew on the formidable talents of his label Top Dawg’s team of producers, but as his musical mentor and most consistent collaborator, Lamar called again on Terrace Martin.

Kendrick was a musical sponge, and as he studied, Martin assembled his jazz-and-hip-hop dream team—Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, and Robert Glasper—to conjure new ideas and collaborate with Lamar’s other producers.

Thundercat was already pals with Flying Lotus, and together they created the musical base for the song “Wesley’s Theory.”

The sixteen songs that came out of these sessions were painted from a musical palette of funk, jazz, gospel, soul, hip-hop, bossa nova, and Afrobeat.

One such moment happened on the song “Complexion.” Terrace Martin brought Robert Glasper into Dr. Dre’s studio for a session, and he and Kendrick played Glasper a succession of tracks—an opportunity to get his playing on as many songs as they could in one shot.

In the final mix—which featured a verse from Rapsody, a North Carolina protégé of 9th Wonder—Martin and Kendrick faded the straight beat out from underneath Glasper, leaving nothing but his bare, comped chords.

Kendrick Lamar’s “Complexion” is a great example of a transition between Straight Time and Dilla Time,

“I need that sloppy!” Kendrick yelled over Knxwledge’s beat for “Momma”—employing the adjective as a noun, putting language to the time-feel that had become a vital part of his expression but had as yet no fixed name.

The album, which had metamorphosed into To Pimp a Butterfly by the time of its release in the spring of 2015, marked a resurgence of that rhythm, one that had entered hip-hop and R&B more than a decade earlier.

the album was the most significant reunion yet of the alumni of Dilla University.

Martin never felt he had to choose between hip-hop and jazz, nor did he feel tension between art and the street. They were one.

The rappers who were supposedly “alternative,” whether the Pharcyde or Kendrick, they all came from the same place.

Writers also tended to obsess over Kendrick’s lyrics: wordsmiths extolling another wordsmith’s words. But no song is simple text. It is also subtext, context, and pretext.

Hiatus Kaiyote’s Choose Your Weapon in 2015 became the most audacious and extensive deployment of Dilla Time that any group of traditional musicians had yet attempted.

Hip-hop producers and artists began sampling them: 9th Wonder used them for the final song on Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, the album for which the artist would win a Pulitzer Prize; Anderson .Paak, a former assistant to Sa-Ra Creative Partners and now a budding superstar, mined their material, as did Drake, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé.

It was Dwele, dancing and clapping as if to encourage everyone behind him to do the same. Welcome to Detroit. Welcome home. And they played, swinging on the strait.

Colonialism and capitalism had forced a European frame on much of the world’s popular music.

Ahmir made a point to work in a half-dozen J Dilla “easter eggs” in their set every week,

Then came the evening in 2016 when the musical guest—a young pop singer from Long Island whom they had never met, Jon Bellion—re-created and name-checked an obscure J Dilla beat onstage before launching into his own song, which he then played on an MPC in front of a national audience.

Ahmir caught Bellion after the show: “Dilla would have been proud,” he told the young artist. Dilla would undoubtedly have been proud of his friends in the Roots, too.

“If you know me,” Glasper told the audience, “you know that J Dilla’s a big part of my life. The only producer that … changed the way I play music. He literally changed the way a whole generation plays their instruments.”

T3 knows that it might not mean anything. It might just sound good.

Some of them would stand for a long while, a quiet communion. Questlove was like that when he came. 9th Wonder put his palms on the glass and closed his eyes.

Herm’s sense of loneliness was compounded when James’s friend and Herm’s supporter since his first lupus walk, Phife, died of kidney failure.

Each and every Dilla’s Delights donut since the very beginning has been made with a pair of drumsticks.