Courtesy of OKP.

J Dilla: the Mozart of hip-hop

Childhood cello lessons paid dividends for the late J Dilla when he shook up urban music with his maverick beats. Now the classical world is saluting one of its own

• Rob Fitzpatrick
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 January 2011 22.15 GMT
• Article history

'His music is full of subtle things' … J Dilla. Photograph: Johnny Tergo/AP

The classically trained virtuoso Miguel Atwood-Ferguson grew up listening to Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin. He started playing the violin when he was four, began composing orchestral music at 10 and took up the viola at 12. The first musician he truly loved was Bach, but Atwood-Ferguson knows precisely what drew him to the music of James Yancey, aka Jay Dee, aka J Dilla.

"Dilla is a modern genius," he says. "Everyone has genius within them, but not everyone, for whatever reason, manifests it. But Dilla did. He stood for taking a great risk on different levels, for continuous hard work and for courage. He is a modern genius because he captured and represented the spirit of a particular time. What he did was so deep that he has influenced a huge amount of modern music. In an age when many of his peers are still more interested in vanity, Dilla was more interested in exploration through music. And that is why he is a modern genius."

Born in 1973, James Yancey grew up in the Conant Gardens neighbourhood of Detroit and began making beats at home when he was just 11 years old. His mother was a singer and his father, Beverly, played piano and bass; together they had an a capella jazz group, and there would always be singing at home. By the time he was in his early 20s Dilla's music – full of rich, utterly unique drum sounds, warm, muzzy instrumentation and endlessly inventive melodies – was so popular he was getting called at home by A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Busta Rhymes. In 1996, Tribe were Grammy-nominated for their Dilla-produced album Beats, Rhymes and Life – but he had to be strongly persuaded to even attend the ceremony. "He didn't really want to fuck with none of that," Tribe rapper Q-Tip told Vibe magazine a few years later. "And I don't blame him."

Dilla died from a lupus-related illness nearly five years ago in February 2006. In 2007, on what would have been Dilla's 33rd birthday, Atwood-Ferguson and independent hip-hop champion and producer Carlos Niño released their brass, strings and woodwind version of Dilla and Common's Nag Champa for free download. They created the track in Niño's LA apartment with just one microphone, recording one instrument at a time. An EP that featured more of Dilla's works – Antiquity, Nag Champa, his old group Slum Village's Fall in Love and A Tribe Called Quest's Find a Way – followed a few months later.

In February last year, Atwood-Ferguson put a 60-piece orchestra together to play a special tribute concert for Dilla at an arts centre in LA. Dilla's mother, Maureen, was a special guest and the night, Suite for Ma Dukes, was named in her honour. The CD and DVD recorded that night show Dilla's music to be, by turns, fantastically complex and head-noddingly simple, while Atwood-Ferguson's orchestrations are overpoweringly alive with the possibilities of where this brilliant musician, someone who made startling records with De La Soul, Janet Jackson, Erykah Badu and Common, among a wealth of others, could have gone next.

"There is a depth and honesty in his music, in the way his beats meld together," Atwood-Ferguson says. "His music is full of subtle things that most people aren't aware of – and they shouldn't have to be. People should just enjoy it."

Dilla was, perhaps, the only hip-hop producer to have studied the cello ("Not the instrument of choice in the ghetto," as his mother puts it in the sleevenotes) as a child, and his work is full of the sort of subtle but powerful differences that a composition-based education might provide, as Atwood-Ferguson noticed when he broke down the pieces ahead of arranging them for the orchestra.

"Dilla loves five-bar loops," he says. "He loves sevens and elevens as well, but within the phrases of five, he will have different parts of the beat looped in threes, fives and sevens a lot as well. Two of my other favorite musicians, Billie Holliday and Elvin Jones, very naturally phrase in three, five, and seven as well, without even seemingly being consciously of it."

The normal hip-hop loop will be a strict four-bar pattern, but Atwood-Ferguson doesn't think Dilla was ever trying to be unsettling or overly technical. "He just loved the effect music could have on himself and others," he says. "As listeners, we're not supposed to notice those things. Dilla was purely about expression, he was trying to say that life is beautiful, we are lucky to live it, we need go for whatever it is that is in our hearts."

What is remarkable about Suite for Ma Dukes is how relatively obscure Dilla productions like Don't Nobody Care About Us or Gobstopper have been entirely reinvented, the breadth and depth of his textures and ambitions highlighted by these new arrangements. Atwood-Ferguson broke down his chosen pieces into a variety of different elements, including the meaning of the song and emotional content. The melodies, harmonies and basslines from any samples used in the original recordings were recreated.

"There are actually hundreds more steps to this whole process," he says, "but I will spare you them! To be honest, two of his most famous pieces, Fall in Love and Stakes Is High, I found difficult, so I plan to revisit them. They're not even close to the level of magic that I want them to be at."

Dotted among Dilla's compositions are two pieces by minimalist French pianist and phonometrician (someone who measures sounds), Erik Satie. "Satie, Ravel, Debussy and Poulenc are all impressionistic composers," Atwood-Ferguson says. "Dilla's music definitely has a lot of parallels with those people. Their music centres around love, passion, joy, fascination, imagination and lust. Dilla made very sensual music. What was important to me was to bring love and appreciation to Dilla's legacy, I hope it shows the profound humanity and depth of heart which he consistently operated with."

Dilla's illness first came to light after he returned home with flu from a European tour in 2002. His mother took him straight to hospital where a blood test showed he had both lupus, an auto-immune disease that causes inflammation and organ damage, as well as thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, a blood disorder that causes microscopic thromboses to form in the blood vessels.

By the late summer of 2005, Dilla was bedridden in Cedars-Sinai hospital in LA, where Eazy-E and the Notorious B.I.G. had died. Although he was insured, the bills for his long hospital stays were huge, more than $200,000 each. He needed dialysis three times a week and that alone cost nearly $2,000 a session. Prescriptions could run to $2,000 a time. Specialists were more than $6,000 a week. But still Dilla worked. He had his studio moved into his room, determined to finish his latest album, despite the pain and discomfort. His mother would massage his hands when they became swollen and painful.

He released the album Donuts on his 32nd birthday, 7 February 2006. He died three days later, leaving two daughters, Ja'Mya, now nine and Paige, 11. He also left a large unpaid tax bill and such a mess of rights issues around the use of his beats – many given out freely on CDs to friends before his death – that the executor of his estate (also his accountant) Arty Erk, had to take out an ad in Billboard in April 2008 requesting that people stop using his client's work. A viper's pit of claims and counter-claims have followed, with his mother and his children all suffering. Bearing all that in mind, it's some sort of miracle that Atwood-Ferguson has brought the focus back to Dilla's music while passing on part of the proceeds from the concert and its digital offshoots to Dilla's mother and his estate,

"It was a magical night," Atwood-Ferguson says of the event. "In an age when hip-hop music is so frowned upon, an event like this one was just a little indicator that, in fact, it deserves profound respect and is just as valid as any other art form. Mrs Yancey was in tears – she was glowing with appreciation, pride and wonderment. Some of the most meaningful moments in my entire life were spent getting to enjoy that whole experience with her."

So, has the whole experience made you want to orchestrate other modern composers' music, I ask?

"Most assuredly," he laughs. "Jimi Hendrix. Stevie Wonder. John Coltrane. The Beatles. James Brown. This is just the tip of the iceberg."

Suite for Ma Dukes is out now on Mochilla. To mark what would have been J Dilla's 37th birthday, there are three J Dilla Changed My Life events: at the Deaf Institute, Manchester, on 4 February; at the Scala, London, on 6 February; and at Jam, Brighton, on 9 February. Details: thedoctorsorders.com

Cheers Harlepolis. Didn't get the paper today, otherwise i would have missed this.

Dilla was truly an original and am sure as hell gonna be at the Scala on the 6th.

You coming?