Nujabes or J Dilla?

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AW SHIT, NOW WE'RE TALKING

That's a really, really hard one. Both were absolute masters at their craft, and I usually wind up listening to them every day. Dilla has a lot of really awesome material, especially his stuff with Slum Village and Donuts, but Nujabes had this really distinctive, powerful way of producing his material that's definitely made me shed a tear a few times. I'd have to go with him as my personal pick out of the two, but Dilla probably had the biggest impact on the industry overall.


While I'm at it, have some rare live footage of Nujabes at Metamorphose in 2008. He had his co-producer, Uyama Hiroto, show up as a surprise to contribute a sax solo. Really moving stuff.


Here's him live in 2006 doing Feather with Cise Starr. Also really cool seeing him work.
 
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The Sourdough Region said:
It's a hard choice for me as well, but I find myself listening to a lot more Nujabes than J-Dilla. But those times I do go on a Dilla binge are wonderful.
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I think personally Nujabes had a larger impact on me due to watching Samurai Champloo back when I was a teenager. I fell in love with his music ever since.
 
samuraicrack said:
I think personally Nujabes had a larger impact on me due to watching Samurai Champloo back when I was a teenager. I fell in love with his music ever since.
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To be fair, Dilla's put out some really funky, awesome stuff too. Here's him live with Slum Village back in 1997:


And although this isn't exactly Dilla, Baatin, one of his pals in Slum Village, put out a whole album that's severely underlooked:


This guy deserves a lot of credit. He died not long after Dilla did, and without any sort of fanfare, despite probably being one of the finest to ever do it.
 
It was harder to find out about Dilla then it was to find out about Nujabes.
 
Nujabes has a much larger legion of obvious imitators. I think it's a combination of the jazzy influence and being japanese so he has the all the weeb fanboys who love him for that reason alone.

J Dilla is a huge influence for American hip hop producers, but he didn't kickstart a genre in the same vein Nujabes did. He's kind of the hip-hop Steely Dan - very popular with professionals in the genre, and possessed with absolute mastery of his craft, but relatively unknown to the garden-variety music fans.
 
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