Posted on 02/12/2009
As people instinctively travel the paths of rhythm, their quest can lead to any number of places. For some of us, however, the journey itself is the destination. So what happens once our favorite trails have become too worn to still wander astray, and our beloved excursions become mundane commutes? I’m a firm believer that the continuous rehashing of a classic record can lead to a deeper appreciation of the music. With that said, you’d be hard pressed to find too many diehard fans of A Tribe Called Quest who wouldn’t trade years worth of insight for the chance to hear those songs , 1nce again for the first time. Well, leave it to J.Period to punctuate our regularly scheduled (mid-night mar-aud-er) programs. I can think of few tasks more daunting than the quest to tweak Q-Tip’s most classic material, yet with The [Abstract] Best, J.Period might have just found a new road home.

OKP: The [Abstract] Best seems to be your most involved project to date.

J.PERIOD: [Laughing] You can say that again.

OKP: Can you give me a clue to the extent? What is in store for people when it drops in two days?

J.PERIOD: There’s a lot of background to this: for people who don’t know about my mixtapes, each one has become more evolved and involves the artists more and more. I started this [tape] two years ago when I went to Q-Tip when he was originally going to release The Renaissance. That process ended up getting delayed, so the mixtape got delayed. In that time, I was able to really reach out to a huge number of artists and get their involvement. Then this thing picked up steam again in August of this year. It’s always a combination of good fortune, good timing, and connections. Also, at this point, the number of artists that know—and I guess respect—the quality and the time I put in has made it so that a lot more people are willing put their own time into doing this. I’m doing this one for Tip, really out of respect for his legacy. It’s been amazing to me how many other artists are willing to put their time towards it out of respect to him, and also out of knowing that I’m going to do them justice. The list of artists is really bananas: Q-Tip, De La Soul, and Black Sheep of the original Native Tongues; and then you have Black Thought and ?uestlove from The Roots, Skillz, and Zion I; some new generation cats like Blu, Reks, and Kid Cudi; umm, Consequence, Pharoahe Monch; everyone. I reached out to about ten or twelve artists hoping to get two or three, and ended up getting about ten. It’s been a really crazy process. I felt like my responsibility was just to do it justice and really make everyone happy to be a part of it. It has grown beyond what I thought it was originally going to be: you know, I also sit down and interview the artists when I do these. For this one I interviewed Q-Tip, De La Soul, and Busta Rhymes—and Bob Power.

OKP: Wow.

J.PERIOD: He is the engineer that Tribe made famous on Midnight Marauders. So yeah, a lot has gone into it.

OKP: The De La cover of “Excursions” is crazy. Are the other tributes that fleshed out?

J.PERIOD: Well, De La is the most exciting and the one I wanted to drop [first], because it’s De La and those guys are legends. Along with Q-Tip and Black Sheep, they were one of the first groups I was fanatically into, long before I ever thought about DJing as a job—or even really DJing as a hobby—back when I just had CDs. I think that even the joint that Blu did, the joint that Zion I did—those artists obviously aren’t of the legendary caliber of De La, but they killed it as well. The final piece of the puzzle came in today, which is Black Thought, and, you know, that one is—ridiculous! So, I’m working with some good stuff here.

OKP: Nice. I don’t know if these tracks are all covers like “Excursions” or what, but how did you decide who did what? Was there a tug of war over any certain song?

J.PERIOD: Honestly, as a DJ, and particularly a mixtape DJ, I’m always taking songs apart and putting people’s vocals over other beats, so I have a pretty good ear for what an artist’s style is, their voice, and how it’ll sound on a certain beat. With almost every single one, I heard it in my head and purposed it to the artists, and it happened to be something they were into. I guess I was sort of in tune to what would work. On a couple of them, like with Pharoahe Monch, I kind of gave him a couple choices and he chose “Midnight” from Midnight Marauders. Some of the artists chose to do tributes where they would borrow lines, and others like Pharoahe chose to do something in the spirit of the original but created a whole completely other universe. Pharoahe’s song is the most incredible to me. I’m trying to think if there are any exceptions, but for the most part it was just me hearing their voices in my head, and giving them tracks that I thought would work. I happened to get lucky –or chose well.

OKP: To go back to what you said about each of your mixtapes having gotten more involved: Lately, like with the March 9 Biggie tribute, you have been doing back-to-back-to-back remixes where you did new production. I think Q-Tip is probably the first emcee you’ve covered that was also the producer. Was that different?

J.PERIOD: Oh I see what you mean. Yeah, I think it was really difficult. I tried to do something different on this tape that I hadn’t done before, which is to show all aspects of who Q-Tip is. My goal was not just to show him as an emcee and put him on other people’s beats, but to take his verses from other places and put them on his own beats that he created. Like, he produced Mobb Deep’s “Give up the Goods.” People might not know he did that, so I took a Q-Tip verse and put it on that beat. Another thing that I did a lot of is — you know, with a group like Tribe it’s impossible to go back into the history books and pick apart exactly who did what, but one thing I found in all of the conversations I’ve had is that Q-Tip was always the guy with the records. Q-Tip was the sample guy. He had an extensive library of records, and so what I did to pay tribute to that is I went back and found all the originals of all of the songs he sampled. I chopped them up, and I remade the tracks out of elements that he sampled. So, I did “Breathe and Stop” and disassembled the song. I took the drums from “Breathe and Stop,” mixed it with the Minnie Ripperton sample he used on Tribe’s “God Lives Through,” and the baseline sample he used on—what’s that song? “1988, Senior year at Garvey High,” uh—“Butter.” Then I tried to recreate, out of all of the pieces he’s done, new tracks that pay respect to all aspects of what he did. So, it really is super, super intricate and the hardest thing about doing something intricate is that most people, when they listen to music, they don’t really care. They just want to hear something that sounds hot, so it’s not just about taking it apart, but also putting it back together in a way that makes it new and fresh and introduces it to a new generation of fans.

OKP: I can’t wait to hear this. That sounds crazy.

J.PERIOD: Yeah, that one was my personal favorite. [Laughing]

OKP: Do you ever find that the intricate stuff goes unnoticed? People might say you did a dope mixtape—mixtape of the year—and all that, but do you ever feel frustrated, like they don’t even fully realize what you did? Or are you satisfied it the whole thing comes across well?

J.PERIOD: The real challenge is tying to appeal to the people that are casual listeners at the same time as appealing to people that are, you know, fanatical hip-hop – nerds. [Laughing] That’s the tough part. I think that for me the test is: does this stay in your CD player along with your favorite albums? That’s really my goal; if it appeals to you in a way that you want to keep listening to it. My hope is that even the casual listeners will discover things over time. A lot of the subtly might go unnoticed, but I really want to create something where six months down the road, somebody’s gonna hear it again, and go, ‘Oh shit! I didn’t realize he did that!’ That’s fun for me, because that’s what a Tribe record was for me as a kid. It was all these little, tiny things that played off of each other, like internal references. It was like a whole universe. I tried to create a whole universe with this, and so far—in Volume 1—I feel like it’s very successful.

OKP: What can we expect for Volume 2?

J.PERIOD: Volume 2 is a little bit more intricate. If Volume 1 tries to highlight the more mainstream — I can’t even really say that, because I tried to avoid the obvious choices, but you also couldn’t make — When I started this project I was trying not to have “Check the Rhyme” and “Award Tour” be on there, because I was like, ‘Nah, it’s too obvious.” But by the time I got to the end, I was like how can I make this CD and have that not be on there. So, that is the stuff that’s on Volume 1. On Volume 2 are songs that maybe Tip did for other artists, that he produced, appearances that are sort of rare tracks. If Volume 1 gives you a taste for it and you get hungry, Volume 2 is like, okay, now there’s a lot to chew on.

OKP: Cool. When’s that coming out?

J.PERIOD: The plan right now is to hold it for about two to four weeks so I can really fine tune it. The plan is that we’re going to be releasing limited edition t-shirts and also flash drives, you know, little digital storage devices. People that really are the true heads; if they come to get one of those on jperiod.com, they’ll have early access to Volume 2 along with a bunch of bonus material that’s not going to fit on either CD.

OKP: Speaking of you trying to keep your tapes in the CD player, is that why your drops are so low key compared to other mixtape DJs?

J.PERIOD: Because, like, who the fuck wants to listen to that? [Laughing] I mean really? At the end of the day it’s music. If it promotes me, it should be promoting the fact that I make good music or I put good music together. I’m much more interested in making something that I can listen to when I’m driving around, and I know I don’t want to hear myself talking. To me, I’m paying respect to the artists. I’d rather hear what the artists have to say, and if it just so happens that there are artists that want to big me up, and give me those kind of drops, then sure; I’ll put some of those in so people know that I made it. But that was never really something that I liked on other people’s mixtapes, so I never really wanted to do that.

OKP: Yeah, and we appreciate it.

J.PERIOD: [Laughing] You’re welcome!

OKP: When you put a tape like this together, you obviously have to worry about the sheer mixing, and matching of tempos, etcetera. Can you talk about the balance of the actual mixing with trying to curate a good, logical progression of an artist’s best-of?

J.PERIOD: For me it’s just like telling a story, or making a movie: they have to operate on multiple levels. The flow of the music and the tempos have to continually keep you involved, and change and adapt as the mix goes on. There have to be high moments and low moments like in any good story. …I think there’s definitely a flow to it. I also like to make it make sense.

The cool thing about Tribe is that there was always that kind of random component to what they did, and to the orders of the songs. I actually recreated the Midnight Marauders voice. I had somebody record it. I wrote a script with all these different things that try to play off the Midnight Marauders interludes. Then I recreated them. I went back and got the original sample and chopped it up. I even actually called Bob Power and asked him how he made them, and recreated the effect. So there’s those kinds of things where it jumps around, but one of the other things that really was important to me on a Tribe album — first of all, let me say that no one really makes albums any more, so this is probably going to be lost on the entire generation of young hip-hop heads that hear this, but to anyone that knows Tribe’s stuff, you know that when you hear the end of one song, you instantly know what song it’s going into.

OKP: Exactly.

J.PERIOD: That was the way they put their shit together, and it was so tight that if I played you the end of a song, you’d be able to automatically tell me what the next one is. So what I tried to do was actually recreate some of those moments, but do it in a different way. So like at the end of “Jazz,” “Jazz” ends and “Skypager” is next. But instead of doing “Skypager,” I just have “Do you know the importance of a Skypager? ” and then it drops into a little interlude that I made where I’m actually playing voice mail messages from Big Daddy Kane and Bob Power that they left on my machine. You know, messages—It’s has a little double meaning.

OKP: That’s—that’s—J. that’s dope.

J.PERIOD: Yeah! And like you asked before, a lot of that is going to be lost on most people, but the people that get it are gonna be… [Gasps]

OKP: [Laughing]

J.PERIOD: [Laughing] They’re gonna go crazy!

OKP: And Tribe is definitely the group to do that with, because no matter how dorky you go, and how intricate—

J.PERIOD: Yeah.

OKP: Tribe heads are going to know exactly what’s going on.

J.PERIOD: Exactly! Exactly! Because I’m one of those Tribe heads.

OKP: Exactly.

J.PERIOD: And that’s the reason why I can do that, because I don’t have to listen to the albums to know the transitions.

OKP: Exactly.

J.PERIOD: I can tell you that shit off the top of my head.

OKP: Maybe this is a special project, but in general, how do you get your hands on things like the Biggie acapellas – things that aren’t just floating around? Do people open up the vaults for you or what?

J.PERIOD: Each one of these [tapes] have its own little magical story. For this one there’s a DJ that lives in my neighborhood in Brooklyn named Sam Champion, who happens to be one of those dudes who’ll tell you every single [sample in a song.] And he blessed me with pretty much every sample. From every Tribe song. Ever!

OKP: Whoa.

J.PERIOD: [Laughing] So that’s that. With the Biggie [tape], again, a good friend of mine who showed me the ropes as far as the mixtape game goes—a guy named G. Brown. He doesn’t really do mixtapes anymore, but G. Brown is a magician at finding acapellas. Almost all of those Biggie acapellas came from G. Brown. That project was a collaboration between me and G. Brown, and he brought the vast majority of the acapellas to the table. And I just—I mean what could be iller than Biggie acapellas? [Laughing]

OKP: [Sigh]

J.PERIOD: Yeah! That no one else has.

OKP: Yeah, everybody has, like, “Nasty Boy” and that’s it.

J.PERIOD: Right! [Laughing] I don’t know where G. Brown gets them from. He actually has a technique, almost like an engineering technique, for creating acapellas.

OKP: Oh like a—

J.PERIOD: —I’m sworn to secrecy, so I can’t say how to do it.

OKP: But basically he—

J.PERIOD: But, it’s pretty ridiculous.

OKP: That’s interesting. Alright, let me ask you something from left field. You were Lauryn Hill’s tour DJ, right?

J.PERIOD: Uh, yeah.

OKP: It breaks my heart — she still carries around this stigma, the whole: ‘I’d rather have my kids starve than white people buy my records.’ The infamous and fake quote. As a white dude, DJing for Lauryn Hill, do you have an anecdote or something to help dispel that shit?

J.PERIOD: I don’t even feel like there’s a need to dispel it, because it was never true. I know people who went to junior high and high school with her who would laugh if I said that to them. She went to a high school in the suburbs of New Jersey that was probably 60% Jewish. There’s just NO truth whatsoever to that [rumor]. Lauryn Hill is one of these people for whom there are 8 million rumors, and that’s a consequence of her being so famous, so fast, so young. I think that’s also one of the reasons why she’s had problems, or sort of receded from the limelight. But there’s no truth in that whatsoever. She came over to my apartment one time and hung out for like four hours when we were preparing for the tour. She’s probably one of the most ivy-league-smart and insightful people that I’ve ever met in my life. So yeah, there’s nothing at all to that [rumor].

OKP: Yeah, thanks, it always bothers me to see that come up.

J.PERIOD: There are a lot of rumors about her with more merit than that one, and I don’t even lend credence to all that, because no one has a sense of how difficult it is to be in that position—particularly when you’re young.

OKP: Thanks. Any word on what she’s up to these days?

J.PERIOD: Honestly, I haven’t really communicated a whole lot with her recently. My stretch [of DJing for her] was brief. From what I’ve heard, it’s more about her family now than music. But if I was standing at the sidelines looking at the music industry now, I probably wouldn’t want to make a come back if I was her either. [Laughing]

OKP: Yeah, really. Alright, well let’s wrap this — any original production work on the horizon for you, aside from your mixtapes?

J.PERIOD: I just actually finished producing the entire soundtrack for a Tony Hawk Nintendo DS game that came out in November. That was definitely a good one for me in terms of breaking into that world.

OKP: How did that come about?

J.PERIOD: Through some folks that knew my mixtape work — in particular The Roots mixtape and then the Game Rebellion mixtape that I had done. The Game Rebellion mixtape really fit the hip hop/rock aesthetic. There’s a lot more kids in the inner-city skateboarding now than ever before, so they wanted something that could bridge that gap. I tried to create music that fit that vibe. I’ve also done a couple of tracks that were used in movie trailers. One of them was used in American Gangster, and another one was used in Street Kings. I look for those opportunities, but the way I see it – it’ll all happen in its own time. Right now, I’ve built a really good network of connections with artists, who I feel like when the time is right, I’m going to call for my album, which hopefully we’ll start working on this year. Gotta see how it goes, but that’s the Plan.

Exclusively for OKP, J. Period leaked us this track off Vol. 2, "Youthful Expression" [Remix], J.Period featuring Talib Kweli, Questlove & The Randy Watson Experience. Listen here, and then download it for yourself.

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Support a one of a kind mixtape: The [Abstract] Best can be downloaded here. Many thanks to J.Period and Okayplayer.

For more from M. Steve Hammer (http://www.myspace.com/mstevehammer), visit: http://www.okayplayer.com/reviews.