In the last 20 years, there have been few hip-hop producers as prolific, talented and versatile as DJ Premier. Born Christopher Martin, the beatmaker has been almost inextricably associated with east coast rap throughout his entire career, but the Houston, Texas native is far more eclectic and unpredictable than his pedigree, and even his discography suggests. In addition to working with late rapper Guru in the group Gang Starr, he’s produced everyone from Notorious B.I.G. to Nas, Jay-Z to Janet Jackson, and even ventured into pop territory with collaborations with the likes of Christina Aguilera. But in the new film “The Re:Generation Project,” he joins several other music industry luminaries to venture into territory even he’s never explored, bringing his expertise to bear even as he’s learning new things about a completely unfamiliar genre: classical music.
The premise of the film was to pair up producers and performers like himself with musical genres they hadn’t worked in, and Premier found himself working with a live orchestra to re-record segments he borrowed from composers like Vivaldi and Brahms. Crave Online caught up with Premier last week via telephone to discuss the process of immersing himself in classical music, experimenting with sources of inspiration disparate even for a producer whose bread and butter is sampling, and moving forward as a producer and performer whose musical palette only continues to expand. Additionally, he offered an unexpected scoop for longtime fans who have been waiting for a reunion between him and one of his most gifted collaborators: Jeru the Damaja.
It’s a great honor to speak with you. The reason I listen to albums like Jeru’s “Wrath of the Math” over and over is as much because of your music as his lyrics.
Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it. Myself and Jeru, we’re actually going to get back together. We squashed all of our old history, and we’re going to get back together. We’re not going to announce it, we’re just going to do it, but it’s going to be me and Jeru back in the studio this year.
Wow – that’s great to hear! In terms of “Re:Generation,” you and a few other hip-hop producers have sampled classical music in the past, but this seems like a totally different experience.
Well, I’ve sampled classical music doing hip-hop stuff, like I’ve orchestrated stuff for Nas before. But overall, I’ve never learned how to listen to it and understand it, just how it spoke to me in its original format. Like, whenever I’ve used it for hip-hop beats, I’d loop it and put drums and things like that to it to make it sound like hip-hop. But to do it from its raw, pure form, learn it and understand what it means and how everything is put down, through my tutor Bruce Adolphe, I learned it in a whole different way where the respect factor for it I had before just reached from that day I went to the Brooklyn Conservatory School of Music to get tutored by Bruce, who comes from Julliard. And then once I went to the Berklee College of Music to work with the symphony orchestra to do that part, I had already worked with Stephen Webber before, but not for classical music. It was for an awards ceremony honoring me, Marley Marl, Jazzy Jay, the Zulu Nation, Grandmaster DST who scratched on the song “Rockit” with Herbie Hancock, and Jam Master Jay was honored but he passed away and his mother received an award on his behalf.
That was an awards ceremony, but to get with Stephen and learn how to conduct and move the baton, which I had no knowledge of, and seeing the orchestra re-record with me to lay down parts over what I arranged with the samples that I took from the music library that I arranged for the whole project, I was just blown away. Again, I’m always willing to learn, but I just learned so much, and I have a whole admiration where now I want to go to a symphony, go and catch an orchestra and sit there, where prior to “Re:Generation,” I’d probably be snoring in the aisle seat where you wouldn’t be able to go to the bathroom because I wouldn’t get up (laughs).
So now I have a whole different respect; it’s unbelievable what I learned. It’s going to make me better as a producer, as a person, because now I can share and pass that on to another level where people may want to expand more on just the drum machines and the computers, and go back to the roots of what makes music so great.
How difficult was it to resist the impulse to assemble the classical pieces into loops as you typically do with sampled material?
Well, there were eleven pieces which Stephen and them were familiar with, because they were all known compositions from Vivaldi and Brahms and Mozart and Bach and things of that nature. And when I arranged it, he understood where I placed everything, but I didn’t want to overdo it. Because for one thing, they said, you know, a lot of symphonies are 15, 20, 30 minutes long, and they wanted me to compile it to where it was less than a four-minute piece. So even with that, you’re forced to condense it and make it all make sense, so I was just really, really caught up in the whole thought process of making sure that I remained at a certain level of putting this thing together, and do it where it made sense for what they had me do this for, and still allow enough room for the orchestra to have their parts and not just try to hog the whole thing. Because this was beyond my hip-hop world; this was an extension of that by taking things to a level that I’ve never been a part of.
How do you decide in what direction to take your career now? After having spent so much time doing stuff for Gang Starr and then moved onto more mainstream projects like Christina Aguilera’s album, do you feel free to do anything you want now?
Absolutely. This makes me now want to do more pop music. Now, my hip-hop music will always stay gutter and raw and nasty, because that’s what I love when I hear hip-hop – I love it ugly and raw and just punch-you-in-the-face type of hip-hop. But I am also a musician and a music lover and I respect music on even more levels now that I’ve done this “Re:Generation” music project, so now I want to do more pop; I was saying earlier, I’ll do a Miley Cyrus record, or I’ll do a Justin Bieber record. But I’ll still make it where my production style enmeshes with what they have to accomplish in their genre, and their audience will still come off because I’m going to apply it with a little more knowledge. Like with Christina, I learned so much working with her that I was like, “bring on the next project!” And even though there was no other projects in her world that came to me except for her again when the Bionic album started getting made, I still said, one day something else is going to come around. And this is when “Re:Generation” came to my doorstep, and I was totally up for the challenge.
