J Dilla

James Dewitt Yancey was born on the seventh of February 1974 at the Conant Gardens district of northeast Detroit, the eldest of three children of Beverly Dewitt Yancey — a Pentecostal opera singer and former Cass Technical High School music graduate — and Maureen Yancey, a substitute teacher and former Detroit Symphony violinist. The Yancey household was Black middle-class and musically exceptional. He took up keyboard at three and digital sampling at twelve. He attended Pershing High School in Detroit from 1988 to 1992.

He formed in 1989 with the high-school friends Robert O'Bryant — subsequently known as T3 — and Titus Glover — Baatin — the group Slum Village. The group recorded its first demonstration tape Fan-Tas-Tic (Vol. 1) at the small Conant Gardens studio in 1996. The cassette circulated across the Detroit hip-hop underground and brought J Dilla to the attention of Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. He was hired in late 1995 to produce sections of Tribe's 1996 album Beats, Rhymes and Life — making him the principal exterior collaborator on the foundational alternative-hip-hop production aesthetic of the late 1990s.

He joined as a producer-member the Soulquarians collective at the Electric Lady Studios in New York from 1998 — the production circle that included Q-Tip, D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Common, Mos Def and the Roots' Questlove. He contributed across the next four years the principal production work on D'Angelo's Voodoo (2000), Common's Like Water for Chocolate (2000), Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun (2000) and Common's Electric Circus (2002). The four albums — released across consecutive years — established him as the principal instrumental producer of late-1990s and 2000s alternative hip-hop.

He was diagnosed with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura — a rare blood disorder — in late 2002 and across the following three years declining renal function. He produced from his Cedars-Sinai hospital bed in late 2005 his solo album Donuts — released on the seventh of February 2006, his thirty-second birthday. He died of complications of lupus and thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura at Los Angeles on the tenth of February 2006, three days after the album's release.

He is honored here as the principal instrumental producer of alternative hip-hop.