How J Dilla Changed the Way African Producers Hear Rhythm

James Dewitt Yancey, known professionally as J Dilla or Jay Dee, departed this plane 20 years ago today. His passing prompted a moment of collective reflection in hip-hop: close collaborators spoke of his relentless creative streak and his instinctive ability to work within a team, while followers testified to how the Detroit-born producer had altered their lives for the better. 

J Dilla lived in beats, always at the cutting edge of sound, innovating as he moved forward. In the decade between his induction into A Tribe Called Quest’s extended creative universe in 1996 and his untimely passing from lupus-related complications in 2006, he surfed and surfaced multiple sonic boards, each a distinct phase, guided by an ever-revolving internal compass.

He wasn’t only the guy from Slum Village, or the producer behind Common and Erykah Badu, or the creative force shaping epochal albums — from D’Angelo’s Voodoo to Busta Rhymes’ various works, and later through his musical alliance with Madlib under the Jaylib banner. He was all of these things and more: a builder of scenes and movements, steadfast in his commitment to “the real and the raw.” Two decades on, Dilla remains with us — in the music he left behind, in the work of those he inspired, in the techniques he refined and helped mainstream, and in the countless stories that have elevated the man into myth. Still, he remains deeply human, in sound and in spirit.

Less foregrounded in global conversations about the producer is his impact on African producers, deejays, vocalists, and emcees. When news broke of his passing — after a week in which he had been bedridden, the same week his final opus, Donuts, was released — message boards on platforms like Africasgateway.com were flooded with tributes to his legendary run. Here was a man equally capable of soaring alongside the stars of his era as he was of crafting rap beats for his circle of associates back home in Detroit. 

Dilla’s Influence on African Producers

Ghanaian artist M3nsa was in London when he heard the news, mere hours after it broke. “I remember my girlfriend at the time came home, and I was distraught. We were all broken — my cousins, my siblings. It felt like somebody we knew personally, because we also knew that he’d been unwell,” he tells OkayAfrica.

M3nsa’s connection ran a little deeper than most: his cousin worked for BBE, the British label that released Dilla’s timeless, experimental Welcome 2 Detroit. The Ghanaian artist, whose production credentials stretch back to when he was 15 years old, producing for Reggie Rockstone, recalls encountering Dilla’s music sometime in the ’90s through his older brothers, ardent hip-hop heads.

“My eldest brother gave me Fantastic Vol. 2, and because I’d been listening to so much boom bap, I really enjoyed Slum Village because it sounded quite whimsical. It was very playful. The drums were out of sync — it’s in the pocket but also not over-quantized. I later started making connections. That’s the thing about being a fan: everything connects eventually.”

He went back and discovered Dilla’s work with Busta Rhymes, Q-Tip, and The Pharcyde. “It just blew my mind — like, what is this music that I’m hearing?”

In South Africa, a young Daev Martian had a similar experience: encountering the work first-hand, then only later discovering who was behind it. A Tribe Called Quest’s “Stressed Out” and De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High” were in regular rotation in his uncle’s room. “He was tapped into hip-hop back in the ’90s, so when I heard this stuff, I was like, this is dope. But I didn’t know enough to know that it was Dilla at the time — I was still, like, 12,” he says.

“We didn’t have access to the internet like that back then. It was computers, people buying CDs, and stuff. I don’t even know how he got his music, but he was my source. A lot of us had older brothers or uncles who were tapped in, and you’d just get that music. Whether you wanted to or not, somehow it would land in your ears.”

By high school, Daev Martian, a producer and emcee operating at the cutting edge of South Africa’s broader electronic music community, with several releases on the acclaimed Stay True Sounds label—had begun closely studying Dilla’s music when news of his passing reached him. He only learned of Dilla’s death two years after the fact — a delay that, in retrospect, elevated the producer’s importance. Access to information, he notes, was far less democratic than it is today. Additionally, the producer was niche insofar as global pop and hip-hop are concerned. His work spoke louder than his public personality. “What I’ve taken from Dilla is the application of bass with the chords, time feel, and rhythm, and warmth in the sounds that I use,” he says. 

Across the pond, in Kenya, producer Ukweli was also catching a whiff of the funk. The swing of the drums on The Pharcyde’s “Running” was just undeniable,” he tells OkayAfrica.

“I discovered his music through my mother. She listened to a lot of R&B and neo-soul — D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, The Roots, the whole Soulquarians movement. When I started producing, I began paying closer attention to credits: who produced what, who played on what. His name just kept popping up in most of the music I was listening to.”

A prominent force within East Africa, an accomplished producer and part of the EA Wave movement, Ukweli reckons that Dilla “brought back the human element to music.”

“In a world where producing became digital, he reminded us that what makes music great is that human element, getting away from quantization and adding that human feel, that Dilla time. Dilla made me very conscious about swing and timing. We are supposed to feel the groove. He changed how I produce my drums and basslines,” Ukweli says. 

The connections between Dilla and jazz

Dilla Day events have long been a fixture in cities around the world, and Johannesburg — never one to be left behind—is no exception. The revered Untitled Basement hosted The Donut Quartet’s J Dilla Tribute Concert. DJ Kenzhero, a respected collector, cultural provocateur, and businessman, opened the set with a song selection before the band — Bokani Dyer on keys, Sphelelo Mazibuko on drums, and Sipho Manana on bass — carried it forward. The result was an explosive inquiry into the limits of sound, where beats gave way to improvisation without fully letting go of their original form. Acts of translation ground the music within a local context, freeing it from the rigid structures that keep it named, contained, and constrained.

Dyer, a composer and producer extraordinaire and a true musical gift, released Kelenosi during the hard lockdown in 2020, a period that forced many artists to rethink their creative processes. The album attempted to translate, using a mostly electronic foundation, concepts he’d explored on his straight-ahead jazz albums, as well as on his more electronic excursions as the other half of the Soul Housing Project. Like Dilla, Dyer approaches rhythm and texture with a meticulous touch and an attentive ear — layering loops, percussive elements, and melodic motifs in ways that disrupt the status quo. In this sense, Kelenosi is part of a lineage that traces back to producers like Dilla: musicians who use technology to humanize it.

Reflecting on the conversation between Dilla’s work and jazz traditions, Dyer observes that the link “talks to the legacy and moving on of musical traditions, but not in a traditional way. A lot of the samples that were used in Dilla’s work come from jazz records. It’s moving a tradition forward with new trends and new sounds, but still having the basis being Black American music, like jazz.” 

For Dyer, this has always been an interesting relation to him. “Where I come into it is from both sides. In my high school years, we were listening to a lot of hip-hop, R&B, and soul music, a lot of stuff that Dilla was involved in. I was [also starting to learn the instruments, learning the piano, finding my musical heroes on that side. One of my early piano heroes was Ahmad Jamal,” he says. 

It’s through DJ Kenzhero’s Soul Supreme radio show, which used to be hosted on Kaya FM, that he got hip to the connection. “He had a segment where he would play tracks which had been sampled, and then play the original track where the sample was taken from. [With] us beginning to collaborate, we got deeper into that world, and I found that, wow, there’s a thread that connected musical traditions from a long time ago, speaking jazz specifically, into a newer age with these hip-hop producers,” he says. 

House music, with roots in Detroit, had already found a home on the African continent, proliferating in the southernmost part throughout the 1990s, and building the foundation for the current moment that Afro-house is enjoying on the world stage. While not explicit in his widely known work, dance music influences colored early outings like Slum Village’s “Forth and Back” and later tracks such as “B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)” from Welcome 2 Detroit. Understanding diverse musical traditions — jazz and soul from his upbringing, electronic music and bossa nova he embraced later, and the techniques of producers like Amp Fiddler, Pete Rock, and RZA — was central to how Dilla moved through sound and stayed relevant across contexts. 

The Dilla swing and ‘African Time’

[kimetsu.] is part of a new wave of producers swarming out of the city of Johannesburg and the greater Gauteng province. Over the past five years, he’s been experimenting with a blend he calls drywall, which he describes as “a sonic framework rather than a genre, describing a mode of sound practice defined by restraint, interiority, and emotional containment.” He got hip to Dilla after the producer passed on via Lute’s West 1996. “The one thing that made me stop and pay attention to [Dilla’s] sound was his swing. He had a swing about him, and a bounce, and a particular swagger that, at the time (late 2000s into early 2010s), I had not heard,” he says.

“His sound felt super intimate, and super unfinished. The way the drums leaned forward and backward, all at once–it was just incredible.” 

[kimetsu.] points out two other factors in how he got to engage with the man and his music further: through pirated CDs and through blogs. “I would go on Datfpiff.com and similar blogs, and read about his work, and almost try to find a resonance in what he does, versus what I’m inclined to listen to, which is South African hip-hop. It wasn’t even like I went seeking to know him; that [Slum Village Fantastic Vol. 1] tape really got me interested, because I had not heard anything like that. [There was also] finding people online to have conversations with through Reddit and Mxit at the time also helped a great deal.”

In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas situates Dilla’s rhythmic intuition within a lineage that resonates strongly with African musical traditions, even if Dilla himself never articulated his practice in those exact terms. The book draws parallels between Dilla’s elastic sense of time — his tendency to let kicks lag, snares rush, and grooves breathe — and African polyrhythmic systems where riddim is ridden and written into circular, rather than rigidly counted, structures. Charnas frames this as a diasporic inheritance, carried through blues, jazz, funk, and hip hop, and reactivated through Dilla’s machine-based production. 

There’s an interplay here with what the inimitable jazz musician Herbie Tšoaeli refers to as African Time — a time-lessness that has neither beginning nor end, that finds its way into and out of a sonic train untethered to place, that dislocates genre and displaces the norm. It’s marabi, it’s swing, it’s mbaqanga, it’s Chimurenga music, it’s the blues, marabenta, maskanda, famo — it’s all of these things, circling in and out of the connective nerve that is Black African Music. 

“Dilla was breaking all the rules: the way he was chopping up samples, and re-arranging them to re-phrase them; the way he didn’t quantize his beats; the way he would use multiple samples in one song,” continues M3nsa. By quantize, he is referring to a setting in sequencers and music-making software that allows the user to automatically adjust the timing of notes or beats so they align perfectly with a set grid, like 1/4 notes, 1/8 notes, or 1/16 notes. 

Echoing Dilla’s own line, “holla at the boy, he don’t just produce beats,” M3nsa reflects: “A lot of people don’t talk enough about how dope of an emcee Dilla was. Every artist he produced for was pushing the envelope as far as possible. For me, that became a blueprint, an example of moving music forward. I’ve never really made music that fits neatly into my demographic or background; I’ve always been about pushing music as far as it can go. That approach is a direct influence from Dilla and the likes of him.”

He explains that when you really dive into what Dilla was sampling and how he fused those samples with synthesizers, it becomes clear why his work was so innovative. At some point, he began tracing the sources, listening with other producers and crate diggers who could identify the originals. He discovered that Dilla had sampled Ghanaian music — percussion and licks — from a label called Essiebons, which released some of the most exciting records in Accra during the ’60s and ’70s. 

“Essiebons is my grand-uncle, Bondzie, who I’m named after. All that stuff just made me understand that you can really tap into what’s being missed. That’s really the basis of my production: playing on top of the samples using synths, which is something that Dilla introduced to me in a very special way.”

Dyer became a musician at a time when the neo-soul movement was taking shape. “Dilla’s a big part of the legacy of production and music-making. It’s a lot of music that I grew up listening to, and that molded my approach to music.”

He continues: “Dilla’s music resonates deeply because it’s great art, and it came at a time when it was groundbreaking, and it was someone creating something remarkable, and unique, and stands out from the rest. He was part of a movement, but doing what he did, he stood apart and made a huge impact, and made music that endures. That can be said for a lot of great artists in different genres who capture a certain moment, and a spirit, and have this period where they create amazing work.”

What Dilla’s ubiquity among music lovers on the African continent demonstrates is that we were never outside the conversation. We have always been hip, in touch, attuned to the world around us. It had always only ever been a matter of time before a cultural artefact — be it music, clothing, or other forms of art — arrived on our shores, took root, and seeped through the pores of contested territories, reshaped by the conditions it encountered.

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