Category: Jam Session
A little over 2 years ago James Yancy (aka J Dilla) died of some sort of tragic disease. People are still catching on to him and his incredible wealth of hip hop beats, so I wondered if his anyo0hne here had done so as well. He's pretty chic (being both dead and very talented) so look him up.
Dilla was a hip hop producer and artist for over 10 years, producing the last two tribe called quest albums as well as a ton of others. In the 2000s he's put out tons of beat tapes (collections of instrumental hip hop beats) which have been used all over the place. It is not uncommon to hear a dilla beat several times over by different artists on ixtapes or even official albums. Slum Village (the group of whom he was a founding member) has a great album (Fantastic 2) laced entirely with his production.
I wasn't a huge fan of dilla (mainly because his unquantized off-beat sound still doesn't really appeal to me) but he has the nack of squeeziing the beauty out of the least useful part of a song. Any beat you can find by dilla is guaranteed to be catchy or pleasant in some way. Downsides are that he has bad taste in drums (sloppy claps and snaps... boring) and his music is intentionally off-beat as I've said before.