Dilla in his home studio. Karriem Riggins: I’m sure some of Dilla’s stuff prior to Donuts really inspired the jazz community, actually. You know, a lot of his beat CDs, and Donuts especially, were all so heavy on soul.

1. J Dilla Donuts Vinyl
2. Donuts J Dilla Blogspot

And I think that sense of versatility he showed on those recordings affected everyone, because a lot of those beats were polar opposites. You have a sample one song, and then Dionne Warwick on another. His ability to be so versatile is what’s really inspiring a lot of the young producers and musicians. Some producers will only mess with samples from like the ’70s disco/soul era. But Dilla was up for sampling any genre of music at any time.

I mean, there’s even a Frank Zappa sample on Donuts (laughs).Adam Dorn: I totally think Dilla inspired jazz in recent years. Especially with drummers. He’s influenced Mark Giuliana and Zach Danziger in terms of their fusing playing with programming-style playing and time feel. It’s kind of insanely unique. A non-drummer has influenced more jazz drummers or rather jazz-like drummers than any other drummer in recent memory.Jeff Parker: The swing of Dilla is definitely something that’s been more prevalent in jazz in the post- Donuts era. However, I hear his influence more in that whole out on the West Coast than on the jazz scene. A lot of jazz musicians latched onto his feel, but like I said, Donuts, in my opinion, was such a different and unique moment in Dilla’s whole body of work.

It affected Tortoise, however, especially when we were making and the whole way we constructed that record, or at least parts of it. J Dilla’s mother, Maureen Yancey, a.k.a. Ma Dukes, poses with Dilla’s custom-made Mini Moog Voyager Synth and Akai MIDI Production Center 3000, which were donated to the Smithsonian. (Photo: Courtesy of J Dilla.)It seems like between the Madlib universe, Dilla’s sonic scope and Karriem’s great work for the label Stones Throw has been a driving force in the way jazz grooves, for lack of a better term, in recent years. Does it look like that from your end? Why or why not?Wolf: There was some jazz that crossed over into my childhood record collection like Grover Washington and Herbie Hancock and George Duke, but for the most part, I got more into jazz in the ’90s due to groups like Tribe and Gang Starr sampling jazz cats from labels like CTI and Blue Note. And when Madlib approached me in the late-’90s about making his own jazz album, I thought he was crazy because he didn’t even own any instruments other than a sampler and I only knew him as a rapper and hip-hop beatmaker, not an instrumentalist.

But I was intrigued only because what he did with an SP1200 was so advanced. So instead of giving him an advance for his jazz concept album as, I just bought him some vintage instruments and he taught himself how to play them.‘He was not just a beatmaker. He was a real musical visionary in terms of how he created sounds, and that is forever relevant.’And that was Stones Throw’s entry into “jazz.” And Dilla was one of the first people to tell me he really dug the YNQ stuff back then and he was kinda experimenting with doing jazz covers of his own, like his cover of that he did shortly after we released Yesterdays New Quintet. But I’d never call Stones Throw a driving force in jazz. Stones Throw was never meant to be genre-specific nor is Madlib, nor was Dilla.

You look at most of our record collections and they’re all over the place. Parker: You can definitely hear Madlib’s influence on Donuts. I’m wondering if Dilla was like, “Well, I’m making this record for Stones Throw, and I should perhaps make it more like a mixtape.” It’s got much more of a DJ aesthetic than a beatmaker aesthetic, and that was always the huge thing about Madlib’s records; he even defines himself that way, saying, “I’m a DJ first, a producer second and I’m an MC third.” And that’s why I think Donuts is so different, because it didn’t sound like his beats; it sounded like a mixtape yet it still maintained his aesthetic and his old Detroit four-on-the-floor stuff. It was really unique, man, and really refined. I would say Madlib is way sloppier in his stuff than Dilla was. Dilla’s stuff was always pristine.Dorn: There was a specific run of work where time felt changed so drastically that an entire generation of musicians learned to play behind the beat in a very specific way because of the gear used by Dilla and other producers. Charlie Hunter told me that playing on the D’Angelo stuff was interesting for him because nobody played behind the beat.

Everything was just grabbed and dragged behind the beat, too. So it’s programming and it’s manipulated like a motherfucker.In your opinion, do you think Dilla had this magnum opus in his mind or was the creation of these beats done on a more cathartic level or therapeutic level for him that summer he was in the hospital?Riggins: He would make the beats from his hospital bed at Cedar-Sinai. At that point, he wasn’t mobile.Wolf: I think the pain and suffering he dealt with off and on through his final years contributed to the album he created coming out the way it did, but when he gave me the first Donuts demo on CD, he was in between hospital stays. He was in my car with Madlib and I and we were going record shopping and he just gave it to me to play in the car. I had released the album a few months before (which is Madlib’s instrumental hip-hop alias) and I later felt like maybe he gave me that as his own version of Beat Konducta. I told him that I knew rappers always wanted beats from him but I wanted to release it as-is so if any rappers wanted to rap over the tracks, I’d let that happen on the side.

But, after I told him I wanted to release Donuts as an instrumental album, he told me he wanted to go back and work on the tracks even more and make it even longer, which he did, and then he got sick and went back to the hospital. I still have the original early version of the album on CD that he gave me somewhere in my garage or storage and have been meaning to dig it up and hear how different it was from the final album. (Photo: Stones Throw Records.)I’d love to hear more about the cover concept and the whole design aspect of Donuts. I’m such a fan of ‘s work, especially for this album. Was it based on an actual shop?Wolf: I think Jank did an illustration for the vinyl version because we didn’t have any recent photos of Dilla that we liked.

It was a little similar to his drawing for, which came out on Stones Throw the year before. But for the CD version, Jank used a photo of Dilla, which he pulled from a music video we did for MED for a song called “Push,” which Dilla did the beat for and was in the video. I think Jank didn’t wanna use the photo from the video for a 12-inch record because the resolution would be too pixelated, but years later on the reissue of the vinyl LP, Jank ended up blowing that picture up and it looked fine.

As for that music video, I didn’t even wanna ask Dilla to come to the shoot because in general everybody wanted a piece of him after he moved to L.A. And I assumed he wouldn’t wanna be in the video for a different artist, but he came through and was a good sport about it.So the story goes the album was named as such because Jay loved donuts.

But what was the true meaning behind the title?Wolf: The “donuts” thing was just another tongue-in-cheek thing that Dilla did. I don’t think he really thought too hard about calling his album Donuts. I don’t even to this day know if it was supposed to be an instrumental album or a beat tape for rappers, but I damn near begged him to let me release it as an instrumental album and he agreed. But the “donut” thing could be his ode to unhealhty food (he called another one of his beat tapes “Pizza man”) or it could be because he knew that J Rocc and I loved spinning 45s when we went on the road with him and Madlib, and Dilla sampled from 45s for most of that album. “Donuts” is a nickname for 45s cuz of the hole in the middle.

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We’d all go to Rockaway Records in Silverlake/Glendale and get our fix of 45s and I believe that’s the record store where the majority of the samples from Donuts came from.‘I think the pain and suffering he dealt with off and on through his final years contributed to the album he created coming out the way it did.’Riggins: Listening to music with Dilla was really comedy. We would all go record shopping and spend the whole day at the record store. And we’d come home with these stacks of records where it would take four trips to the car to bring them all into the house (laughs). And we’d play everything, man, and listen and laugh. He was a funny dude. He’d be making jokes about certain things, and then finally he would find something that’s just classic and he’d be like, “Wait a minute, now I gotta touch this.” (laughs) That was his inspiration to make music.Wolf, who was the most famous person to reach out to Stones Throw about Donuts?Wolf: I think Drake is the most “famous” rapper to rap over Donuts, but he didn’t reach out to Stones Throw.

He did it back in 2007 before he was really known.But right before we released Donuts, Ghostface got ahold of the album (or beat tape or whatever you wanna call it) and reached out to Ma Dukes because Dilla was too sick to deal with that kinda stuff and Ghostface told her he was interested in rapping over a track and she asked me if I’d ever heard of him and if she should grant his request and I said, “Yeah, you definitely wanna do that one!” I thought it was so cool that she asked my opinion rather than just going for it. It definitely made me feel appreciated!While Dilla was alive, Ma Dukes had his back more than anyone. She stayed in the hospital with him the whole time and tended to him as much if not more than any of the nurses. She went through so much during his final years and was the rock that held us all together.

(Photo: Roger Erikson.)How does Donuts look on your ends a decade later?Dorn: It’s amazing to witness because now it’s long enough ago that guys don’t even know why they’re playing behind the beat the way they are. Like they don’t even know the records that inspired this in the first place. That freaks me out the most.

Combine that with churches churning out players and you have a rebirth of musicianship.Jeff Parker: We were all giant fans of that record in Tortoise, man. I mean, we all loved Dilla in general. But that record blew everybody’s minds.

We had all been following Dilla’s music, and whenever he dropped anything we were curious to know what it was going to sound like and one of us would go out and get it. It was a very exciting time.‘Like the most intriguing music, hearing it over and over again, eventually it became one of my favorite things I had ever heard, still to this day.’For me personally, it wasn’t anything I expected it to sound like. It was totally different from the stuff that he had been doing. When I first put it on, I was actually kind of put off by it. I was like, “Yo, man, where’s the smooth beats? Where’s the space?” (laughs) Especially comparing it to all of his other stuff, I was like, “Man, what is this?” But the more and more I listened to it, and like the most intriguing music, hearing it over and over again eventually it became like one of my favorite things I had ever heard, still to this day.

I was actually just listening to it very recently and I always hear new things every time I listen to it.Wolf: One of the coolest things that happened in the last decade was Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s Concert for Ma Dukes. On paper, I generally don’t like when bands try to redo hip-hop songs or albums, but this was done in an undeniable way. I was so moved and touched to be in the audience for that one when they did it in L.A. It was really incredible.Riggins: I feel like the music created on Donuts was really timeless and genius, especially in the way he used those chops and the way he manipulated those samples. It’s coming from a pure musical mind.

He was not just a beatmaker. He was a real musical visionary in terms of how he created sounds, and that is forever relevant. It’s something that doesn’t have a date on it. When I listen to Donuts 2016, it still sounds totally fresh.

J Dilla's eagerly awaited Donuts, the follow-up to 2001's Welcome 2 Detroit (released as Jay Dee), is, like its predecessor, a stark departure from the cozy-socks-and-Xbox feel of his former group, Slum Village. In fact, Dilla, if anything, is imposing a meta-rap bent on neo-soul, assaulting the senses in ways unseemly for a guy who used to work with Q-Tip. The drums, though remarkably fluid, are lighter, domineered by dense, abrasive samples that are sequenced with a sense of swing. Percussive end pieces are shorn cheese-grater sharp, then appended to sickly spliced moans.

The end result is akin to Norman Smith and DJ Shadow sitting in on a RZA-produced session- spry, voiceless prog-hop by any other name.Opener 'Workinonit' comes on like a Rubin-produced take on Schoolhouse Rock. Clang-y guitars give way to doubled-up groans and what sounds like a back-masked Zulu chant. The sample, supplied by '60s soulsters Them, is diced with manic precision, and around the 2:00 mark, the melody builds to a climax, fading, with echo-y vocal bits, into bodiless abyss. Equally engaging is 'Anti-American Graffiti', which combines lighters-up, love-not-war humility with a track both wistful and world-weary: A crazed voice spouts end-of-the-world admonishments like some disenfranchised apparition, colliding with somber guitars.'

J Dilla Donuts Vinyl

Don't Cry' finds Dilla taking sprightly, blu-lite soul crooning and flipping it counter-cockeyed: 'If Blue Magic or Whoever could see me now!' First he plays the original, then throws in the 'Now, you play it and I'll show you how my voice would have made it unbelievable!' Bit, before gently lifting its face off. It's chest thumping, to be sure, like the Copa shot in Goodfellas or Bigger and Deffer. And it's courteous.

Donuts J Dilla Blogspot

Similarly cordial is 'Time: The Donut of the Heart', where he turns the Jackson 5's 'All I Do Is Think of You' into a lucid dream- the song's intro is now with the chorus it always coveted. Says?uestlove: 'J Dilla time compresses Michael and Jermaine's ad-libs with the uneasy ease of a tightrope-walker, with oil shoes on, crossing one 90-story building to another, after eight shots of Patrone.' I'm sayin'.Not that Donuts deals with only obvious sample sources- 'The Twister (Huh, What)' is the sound of flu-sick flutes chiming in time to a busted weathervane; 'Waves', a hiccuping Hare Krishna class. It's Dilla's show-and-tell method, however, that's most effective, because it illustrates how he's, more or less, upgrading soul music- we get to see how he unpacked its bag, what spots he told it it missed. This approach also allows Dilla to pay homage to the selfsame sounds he's modernized; the drums are light, to reflect the original sound from which he's borrowing. In that sense, Donuts is pure postmodern art- which was hip-hop's aim in the first place.