Dilla Time: Dan Charnas and Jason Moran

The award-winning culture writer speaks with the pianist and composer about the life and afterlife of the hip-hop producer who reinvented rhythm.

When J Dilla, aka Jay Dee aka James deWitt Yancey, died in 2006 at the age of 32, his work with the likes of the Pharcyde, Slum Village, Common, D’Angelo, and the Roots had left behind a legacy—and a legend—that would influence countless musicians across multiple genres to this day. Culled from more than 150 interviews with family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators, Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time chronicles Yancey’s life 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. It places his story within the greater story of Black culture in America and examines what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new.

Dan Charnas talks with Jason Moran about one of the most important and influential musical figures of the past hundred years.

This program will be streamed live on the NYPL event page.

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A live transcript will be provided. ASL interpretation is available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org. A pre-filled Gmail template is available by clicking here. Any media will be accompanied by alt text to reference before the program or by audio description.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Dan Charnas is the author of the definitive history of the hip-hop business, The Big Payback. He is also the author of Work Clean, a book that applies chefs’ techniques to almost any life situation. The co-creator and executive producer of the VH1 movie and TV series The Breaks, he lives in Manhattan and is an associate professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Jazz pianist, composer, and artist, Jason Moran is the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center. Moran has recorded 16 solo albums with the most recent being The Sound Will Tell You. Within jazz, his multimedia tributes to Thelonious Monk, Fats Waller, and James Reese Europe have shifted the jazz paradigm by combining striking images, music and history into masterful evening length works. Moran was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010. He scored Ava Duvernay's Selma, The 13th, and the HBO film adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. He currently teaches at the New England Conservatory.

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Dan Charnas © Noah Stephens