Dilla Time is a different kind of book about music, a visual experience with graphics that build those concepts step by step for fans and novices alike, teaching us to see and feel rhythm in a unique and enjoyable way.

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. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and "see" the rhythm of Dilla's beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla's music itself.And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel that he created on a drum machine, but one that changed the way traditional musicians play. This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius' - QUESTLOVEEqual 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.

And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco.By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. His name wasn't known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at the age of thirty-two he had never had a pop hit. The book’s heart is its rich, evocative musicological analysis, complete with rhythm diagrams, of Dilla’s beats… one of the few hip-hop sagas to take the music as seriously as its maker. Dilla Time is a book that will be read and reread as closely and with as much pleasure as we have listened and relistened to Dilla’s music.

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. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialised in symphonies and taught at universities. In the same way that J Dilla’s music was a portal for us to hear our world, understand our technology, and feel the pulse of life anew, Charnas has made a portal through which to understand our time—historical time, musical time, and James Yancey’s own time—in a new way. Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new. Filled with impeccable reportage, elegant prose, and incandescent anecdotes, Dilla Time is more than an urgently needed biography of hip hop’s most revolutionary producer.

In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, 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; and follows the people who kept him and his ideas alive. The cocreator and executive producer of the VH1 movie and TV series The Breaks, he lives in Manhattan and teaches at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and “see” the rhythm of Dilla’s beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla’s music itself.