'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..."
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