By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. He wasn't known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit.

JAMES DEWITT YANCEY (1974-2006), known professionally as Jay Dee or J Dilla, was one of the most influential music producers of our era.This is the story of a complicated man and his machines; his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators; and his undeniable legacy. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialised in symphonies and taught at universities. Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel that he created on a drum machine, but one that changed the way traditional musicians play.

Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teachus to feel and to 'see' the rhythm of Dilla's beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla's music itself. He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. Dilla Time is a different kind of book about music, a visual experience with graphics that build those concepts step by step for fans and novices alike, teaching us to see and feel rhythm in a unique and enjoyable way. He wasn't known to mainstream audiences, even though he worked with renowned acts like D'Angelo and Erykah Badu and influenced the music of superstars like Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson.

Filled with impeccable reportage, elegant prose, and incandescent anecdotes, Dilla Time is more than an urgently needed biography of hip hop’s most revolutionary producer. He also rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of soul in Dilla's own Motown, to funk, techno, and disco. An outgrowth of a course on J Dilla he developed at NYU in 2017, the book’s roots go back to Charnas’s time in the record business, when he traveled to Detroit in 1999 to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee.

Equal parts biography, musicology and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of James Dewitt Yancey, from his Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. Charnas’ book is also an ethnographic key to the funk-da-fide Detroit family and community which nurtured and skilled Dilla in the science of soulful music production from the cradle to his tragic deathbed– preparing the artist to forge his own Cubistic, canonical and revelatory extension of the architectonic Motown legacy.Dilla Time is a book that will be read and reread as closely and with as much pleasure as we have listened and relistened to Dilla’s music. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and “see” the rhythm of Dilla’s beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla’s music itself. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years, a genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the Twenty First Century. This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius' - QUESTLOVEEqual parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century.

Dilla's beats, startling some people with their seeming 'sloppiness,' were actually the work of a perfectionist al- most spiritually devoted to his music. In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted childhood in Detroit, to his rise as a Grammy-nominated hip-hop producer, to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death; and follows the people who kept him and his ideas alive. He scaled the mountain of Dilla’s complex career and sent back instructions so that others could make the climb.The book’s heart is its rich, evocative musicological analysis, complete with rhythm diagrams, of Dilla’s beats… one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker. Since his death from a rare blood disease at the age of 32, Dilla has been celebrated with annual “Dilla Day” festivals across the globe and lauded by journalists from NPR to The New York Times. His music has been interpreted by classical composers and studied at major universities; his drum machine is on exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Here, music is a story of Black culture in America and of what happens when human and machine times are synthesised into something new.