J. Dilla - Welcome to Detroit (Instrumentals)

(2005/BBE)

Download (Sorry about the Z-Share!) - LINK

The tragically unexpected death of Dilla this weekend left me scrambling to try and articulate my love of this mans work. As I try to find inspiration to create my own beats and am left lacking, I try to remeber studio soldiers like Dilla, never reaching “Top 40″ sales (I did hear that Dilla drove a Pea Green Jaguar after scoring some publishing money) but still producing an impressive body of work that leaves heavyweights like Premiere, Q-Tip, Common and ?uestlove scrambling to memorialize him.

The best example I could find was his one solo album. Yes ,Jaylib is amazing, but that was a collaboration with Madlib that coloured his usually solid THUMP with Madlibs’ breezy collage style. His work for Slum Village was groundbreaking in it’s simplicity, but his most solid recording is “Welcome 2 Detroit”, done for BBE back in 2001 but released as instrumentals this past year.

The key here is that while under a production microscope Dilla’s sloppy drum programming and slightly off samples are “loose”, they’re there for a reason, because of the feeling. What Jay Dee brought to the game was, like Rza before him, was a innate rhythym that broke free of the overly quantized 4/4 sound of b-grade hip-hop. This album shows that off in spades with different time signatures, synths, samples and those claps.

I hope that the immitators of his style can take the ideas he had and instead of copying them, expand upon them and keep that Detroit bump going long into the 21st century.

In other news….

I had a 13 1/2 hour Recording session yesterday with Rags 2 Riches (Shouts to Puzzle, Progress, Dox, Blanks and Big Dru, Richie Sosa for coming, Ish up from NYC, Caution, the rest of the weed carriers and those girls…) and now I’m sick. Again, sorry for the ZShare link, but my bandwidth is going up for these whole albums…single instrumentals will all be kept on the server. Waps.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Instrumentals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.