J Dilla (Jay Dee) died Friday in Los Angeles. (Roger Erickson/Stones Throw Records)Hip-hop MC and producer Jay Dee (also known as J Dilla), a founding member of the Detroit rap outfit Slum Village, died Friday morning of kidney failure at his home in Los Angeles, officials at his record label said Friday evening.
Born James Yancey, he was a nationally influential producer and a champion of Detroit’s urban music scene. When hip-hop was largely being dominated by the East and West coasts, he put a distinct Detroit sound on many national acts.
He celebrated his 32nd birthday Tuesday with a new album release, “Donuts.”
“Jay Dee was the man with the beats,” said Mark Hicks, who has been on the Detroit hip-hop scene since the early 1990s and is a former manager of the group D12. Hicks got the word that Jay Dee died from Detroit rapper Proof, who sent him a message via his Blackberry.
“I remember when he was selling beats back in ’95, ’96 for like 100 or 200 bucks,” Hicks said. Beats are the instrumental tracks that form the backbone of hip-hop music.
“Everybody went to him. He was selective. Even back then, you could see him being a producer in the long run just on how he made the music He took the artists and said, ‘This is how you should lyrically say this.’ He was a prodigy.” If you saw him in the studio, it was like he was the man.”
Guided by an encyclopedic ear and a jazz musician’s touch, he molded a signature style that blended hip-hop street bounce with a progressive flair. Live instruments were digitally processed into strange new tones, and vintage soul samples mixed with obscure rock records, with his own warm synthesizer lines layered on top.
“He invented the sound of Detroit hip-hop,” said Waverly Alford, the Detroit rapper known as King Gordy. “He was Detroit hip-hop.”
Jay Dee worked with artists like A Tribe Called Quest, Common, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo and Janet Jackson. Even so, he retained a distinct underground attitude.
He recorded in Detroit, Los Angeles and New York.
In a statement, Peter Adarkwah, founder of BBE Records, said he was deeply saddened to learn of his death. “Jay was one of my favorite hip-hop producers of all time. His passion for music was a rare thing amongst people in the music industry. His music and presence will be sorely missed for many years to come.”
BBE was to release Jay Dee’s “The Shining” a follow-up to 2001’s “Welcome To Detroit” in June of this year.
“It’s a hell of a loss,” said Wayne Washington, who raps under the name Wayneeack X. “He was talented with a capital T. His sound was hard, but there was feeling behind it. It had your head knocking, but it made you think too.”
Jay Dee rarely gave interviews, preferring to stay out of the spotlight. The music community knew, however, that he had health problems. Last year in an interview with the hip-hop magazine XXL, he denied reports that he had been in a coma, but said he spent two months in a hospital’s ICU “with all types of tubes.”
He told the magazine, “I went overseas for two weeks and was eating all this crazy … food. As soon as I got back, I had the flu or something, and I had to check myself into the hospital.” He said the doctors discovered that, “I had a ruptured kidney and was malnourished from not eating the right kind of food. It was real simple, but it ended with me being in the hospital.”
Always the producer, he had a friend bring him a sound system and some vinyl so he could make beats in the hospital.
Denaun Porter, a sought-after producer in his own right, has said that Jay Dee influenced him to pursue his career. Like others who would go on to become members of Detroit’s hip-hop elite, Porter was hanging out in the mid-1990s at the Hip Hop Shop. The clothing store on Detroit’s west side hosted open mic shows and became an epicenter of the city’s emerging hip-hop scene.
Porter said it wasn’t until 1996 that he got serious about making music for a living. That’s when he saw Jay Dee come to the shop in a money green Jaguar. “I never knew anybody that wasn’t a drug dealer drive a car like that,” Porter said. “I liked that life a little more.”
Jay Dee Dee’s musical production came from humble beginnings. He started humbly, making beats on a tape deck. In 1992, Amp Fiddler taught him how to work an MPC-60, an electronic drum machine commonly used in R&B and hip-hop music.
Around 1988, Jay Dee formed Slum Village with Baatin and T3, friends from Pershing High School. Even though he left the group after their first national album, (“Fantastic Vol. 2,” released in 2000), they remained friends and he even produced later tracks for Slum Village.
The group now consists of rappers Elzhi and T3. Both are out of the country, and couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
“Slum Village, man, they were doing their thing,’’ said Terry Scott of Tonya’s Music, a mom-and-pop shop on Detroit’s east side. “He was a pretty hot producer here in Detroit, the first big thing to come out of Detroit as far as producers.
“He was very young. I met him a couple of times. He came in the shop. For a brother like that to die at a young age, that’s sad. This is a loss to Detroit.”
Brian (B.Kyle) Atkins, a longtime documentarian of the hip-hop group the Roots, reported on the Stones Throw Records Web site that a memorial service will be Tuesday in Los Angeles. A Detroit service may be scheduled later.
Free Press music writer Brian McCollum contributed to this report.
