Santa Clara Public Library

On May 19, 2022 at 6:00PM on Zoom we will be joined by Dan Charnas, the celebrated author of Dilla Time discussing the book and the process he took to disseminate the mythology and history of one of the most celebrated producers of all time.

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 by pioneering a new musical time-feel, an accomplishment on par with the achievements of Louis Armstrong and James Brown. Dilla, with only his drum machine, transformed the way traditional musicians play.

As an added bonus famed music historian and journalist David Ma will be in attendance to add his insight and personal take regarding the book, James Yancey the person, and today's landscape of popular music and culture since J Dilla's passing.

Register for this Zoom webinar by using this link here: https://bit.ly/dillatime

BIOS:

DAN CHARNAS is an award-winning music and business journalist; producer of records and television; and professor. Recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Fellowship for Arts Journalism, he is the author of four books; was the co-creator and executive producer of the VH1 TV series The Breaks; and is an Associate Arts Professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University. 

Charnas’s upcoming book, Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, The Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022), is the product of four years of research and nearly 200 interviews. The book was an outgrowth of a course on J Dilla developed by Charnas at NYU in 2017, but its roots go back to Charnas’s time in the record business, when he first made the trip to Detroit to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee. In early praise for Dilla Time, the book has been called “one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker,” by Publishers Weekly; and “detailed, well- researched, and passionate” by Booklist. For more information, visit the Dilla Time site at www.dillatimebook.com.

Dan’s first book, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (2010) was called “a classic of music-business dirt digging as well as a kind of pulp epic” by Rolling Stone. The Big Payback inspired the 2016 pilot for the VH1 series, The Breaks. He is also the author of Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind (2016), exploring what great chefs can teach the rest of us about their particular way of relating to time, space, motion, and resources. Work Clean arose from two years of research and over 100 interviews with culinary professionals. Charnas is the coauthor of Def Jam: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label (2011) with Bill Adler and Cey Adams.He has been a contributor to NPR, Billboard, and the Washington Post; and his writing has appeared in the Financial Times, the Chicago Tribune, Complex, Village Voice, Spin, and more. He has appeared as a guest on CNN, the BBC, PRI, and Bloomberg, and in a number of documentaries. www.dancharnas.com

DAVID MA is a writer, editor, and journalist whose work has appeared in publications like Wax Poetics, The Guardian, Billboard, Rolling Stone, The Paris Review, NPR, Vibe Magazine, The Fader, Pitchfork, XLR8R, Ego Trip, Cuepoint, San Jose Mercury News, Metro Newspapers and others. He is the founder of audioblog nerdtorious.com and is one third of the Dad Bod Rap Pod, a hip-hop discussion podcast based out of San Jose, CA.

JAMES DEWITT YANCEY (1974-2006), known professionally as Jay Dee or J Dilla, was one of the most influential music producers  of our era. Though he worked primarily in hip-hop — collaborating with artists such as The Roots, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and more — Dilla’s sonic and rhythmic impact is now felt throughout the music world from pop to jazz. 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.