Keyboardist Bob James has been sampled in hip-hop classics from Run-DMC’s “Beats to the Rhyme” to Eric B. and Rakim’s “Follow the Leader.” An agogô-bell breakbeat from one of his recordings has propelled tracks by N.W.A. and A$AP Rocky. No jazz artist has been sampled more than him. The term “godfather of hip-hop” has even been tossed around.
Which means he had a profound relationship with rap and hip-hop back when all these songs were released, right?
“Zero. I didn’t have any relationship with it,” the 80-year-old deadpans to Discogs from his lakefront home in Northern Michigan. “I wasn’t very interested in that genre. I was deep in my own work, and in my time away from listening to jazz, I was listening to classical music.”
But, as he heard through the grapevine, producers had begun to cut snippets from his recordings and splice them into their own — oftentimes without permission.
On August 29, a.k.a. Record Store Day, James will unveil his latest archival release, Once Upon a Time: The Lost 1965 New York City Studio Sessions. On highlights like “Serenata,” “Variations,” and “Long Forgotten Blues,” a 25-year-old James leads a piano trio with one ear cocked to the avant-garde.