Posted on 06/15/2009
Though it’s been three years since J Dilla passed, his peers and fans would definitely tell you his presence is still felt while at the same time sorely missed. Now, music’s next generation of musicians are helping to fill the void left behind by the loss of the man and his music, and in the process, helping hip-hop come full circle. Donuts, indeed.

For eight weeks this spring, the past, present, and future of hip-hop converged in a rehearsal room on the campus of Boston’s Berklee College of Music. There, nine students and their instructor looked to their predecessors to help them prepare to become professional musicians with the skills to pay the bills and get the props, as the title of Dilla’s latest posthumous release, Jay $tay Paid, implies. So it makes dollars and sense that the third anniversary of his death found one of America’s most renowned music schools forming the first-ever Dilla Ensemble course, a for-credit class where students learn about and build on the late producer’s legacy.

In recent years, there’s been a growing consensus among the hip-hop heads on Berklee’s campus that Dilla is “the producer that most musicians can really get,” says Dilla Ensemble instructor Brian “Raydar” Ellis. Even before the class became an official part of the curriculum, Dilla was teaching Berklee students how to keep the beat and bring the soul. Ellis, a Berklee alumnus and himself a burgeoning hip-hop artist/producer, remembers how Dilla’s music started to slowly but surely creep its way into practice rooms and gigs across campus. A core part of Berklee’s curriculum is Ensemble courses, where students learn, practice, and create music in a small group environment. While some ensembles are based on music genres, others are centered around the music of a particular artist (there are Bob Marley and Bob Dylan ensembles). “Even when I was a student — even before I was a student — there were students that were there before me that were talking about, ‘I wish there was a Dilla course,” Ellis insists. When faculty at Berklee approached Ellis about teaching hip-hop-based courses as part of its Ensemble department, he took it as an opportunity to pay it forward to both Dilla and his fellow Berklee-ites. Intent on using his background in music synthesis and the knowledge he’s acquired as an “active fan” of hip-hop in general, and Dilla’s music in particular, Ellis set out to teach a course that would give young students a chance to experience what he and others had missed out on — to study a musician whose work you appreciate. At the same time, Dilla’s music would act as a guide to how young musicians could develop the musical discipline necessary to create their own distinct sound.

He describes his process of teaching Dilla’s music as such: “I try to approach it first from a structural standpoint, from an artistic standpoint. We break it down section by section, we play it, we fit it all together, and find the basic groove of the entire song,” he explains. “Then we break down the history. Then I finish off with ‘How are we going to end it?’ and then, ‘Where do we put it in the set list?’ So it’s an assembly line process, but it’s less of an assembly line due to the fact that it’s freer for the students to input what they want to do. I want them to be able to walk out of it with a sense of leadership,” Ellis stresses. In a class like the Dilla Ensemble, where students got the chance to examine everything from the samples he used to the evolution of his career and sound, the impulse might have been to bite Dilla’s style. But Ellis pushed students to ask themselves “How can I take what I learned and then apply those aesthetics to my own art, my own craft?”




The students also came to understand how Dilla used his knowledge and talent to create music that peeked into the past while nodding to the future. Pulling obscure samples to chop required a vast comprehension of different styles of music; slicing and dicing those samples to the perfect size involved learning new beat machine and turntable techniques; making a perfectly hypnotic headnodder of a hip-hop track meant mastering the bass and the beat. “A lot of Dilla stuff, you have to be disciplined and just stay in the pocket. Less is better,” says Chad Selph, keys player in the Dilla Ensemble. Dane Orr, one of the saxophonists in the Ensemble, agrees. “He gets into a groove that no one else had really played before,” Orr says. “It was cool to listen to all the jazz samples and hear how he used them. It’s almost like you’re playing jazz in a way, but in a hip-hop way. His music just kind of perfectly mixes them.” Observations like these touch on one of the main reasons Dilla was — is — so hip-hop, and why his music makes a fine specimen for study: not only did he master the balance of making old sound new and new sound old, but he did so while paying homage to hip-hop’s musical ancestors. Dilla paid dues, and now, even in the afterlife, he’s staying paid.

Looking back while thinking forward has always been an important aspect of music education, or any education for that matter, but Berklee has been slow to teach hip-hop history, instead focusing on the study of the performance aspects of the genre. But as Ellis points out, today’s Berklee student is different from those of the past, and to keep up with the times, the school should start to accept and embrace the fact that hip-hop is an integral part of American popular culture. “You can’t have a music school and not know what kind of music your students are listening to,” he quips. “These kids are growing up with hip-hop their whole lives. They’re like, 18 years old. They’ve been living with Dilla their entire lives. I remember my life before Dilla. They can’t.” In the last decade, hip-hop has become progressively more accessible and acceptable, and it’s that mass appeal that’s finally provoked academia to study the music and its culture.

“Every musical genre goes through these different periods,” Ellis maintains. “It starts with its’ birth; then, the youth accept it while the elders reject it. Then after a while, it proves itself not only culturally, but in the market — it becomes a popular thing. After a while — and I’m talking about a few decades here — after that, it gets studied,” he says. He hopes that with the popularity of hip-hop classes like the Dilla Ensemble and Turntable Techniques, the “suits and ties” at Berklee will be persuaded to continue to invest in hip-hop education, not only for the good of the school, but for the good of hip-hop as both a genre and a culture.

His students are similarly concerned with making sure hip-hop gets its just due. Selph hopes Berklee’s hip-hop courses will “push the whole idea of hip-hop being an art rather than [pushing] the negative side of hip-hop,” while Orr believes classes like the Dilla Ensemble could help hip-hop become “a little more sophisticated in the future,” and are necessary for musicians of any genre because “the more educated musicians are, the better the music is gonna be.” Music’s future isn’t so far ahead of themselves to forget about looking or giving back.


And that was abundantly clear during the Ensemble’s semester-ending recital on May 1st, as they filled the smallish-sized David Friend Recital Hall to capacity with sixty or seventy students that sacrificed dinner at the caf to listen to a 30-minute set of nine Dilla tracks, including “Thelonius,” “Cleva,” “Find A Way,” “Hoes Over Doo Doo,” and “Runnin.” Head-nodding with the authority of those familiar with the music, mouthing lyrics to songs both well and lesser known, shouting out their friends on stage, even obliging Ellis when he asked them to throw their hands up as he played hype man over the Ensemble’s version of “E=MC2,” the crowd seemed just as accepting of the music and the man that made it as they were of the newbies’ reinterpretations of it. In a Q&A after the recital, Ms. Yancey, who was in town to take in the Ensemble’s performance, seemed pleased with what the class and recital meant for both her son’s legacy and the legacies the young music students were in the midst of making, saying, “I can hear your love coming through your instruments.” But these students and their instructor were simply doing their part to understand and enhance the sound that defines their generation, their lives, their cultures, and their music. “We didn’t realize it was going to be such a big deal, so we weren’t really stressin it. We were just kind of having fun with it, just trying to do our thing,” Orr recalls. Still, they weren’t too busy having fun to learn the most important lesson of all. Says Selph, “I would say the biggest thing [I learned] was how much of a genius J Dilla was.”

- Kendra G.

For more Dilla, be sure to check out Jay $tay Paid, in stores now. Also in stores now is Dillanthology.

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