Pete’s debut solo album on Loud Records ‘Soul Survivor’ was released in the summer of 1998. From building a promotional relationship with Pete, Chris was able to bring the talent of Pete Rock to Loud, which resulted in the birth of a solo career. In 1995 Chris LaMonica, National Director of Mix Shows at Loud Records hooked up with Pete who was now the DJ for Future Flavas with Marley Marl on Hot 97. Pete continued to work on his remix and producing skills – see discography below. While riding high on their success, Pete Rock & CL Smooth shocked their fans and the music industry by deciding to go their separate ways in 1994. These are the types of songs that can literally make you cry – damn, they were playing TROY at funerals everywhere. Of The Mind’, and even ‘Lots Of Lovin’ to name a few… ‘They Reminisce Over You’, ‘Straighten It Out’, ‘Ghettos Quite a few of the songs on here are very monumental: Very rarely do you ever come across close to 80 minutes of music with little need to skip to the next track. This album should serve as a model for what every hip-hop producer should strive for when they lay down tracks for an artist. After the solid Mecca/Creator 12″, the duo unleashed one of those all-time classic LP’s every MC dreams of having, “Mecca & The Soul Brother”. With the release of the EP ‘All Souled Out’ in 1991 and two full-length albums ‘Mecca & The Soul Brother’ in 1992 and ‘Main Ingredient’ in 1994, Pete Rock & CL Smooth becameĪ major force in the rap community. Today Pete Rock is regarded as an icon in hip hop. Not content with being a producer and DJ, Pete hooked up with long time friend and rapper CL Smooth in 1991. With a solid fan base behind him, Pete decided he wanted to expand his musical talents, so in the early 90’s Pete began producing. It makes me feel good about the world that Pete Rock’s pain has inspired so many new ideas.Pete Rock first exploded onto the music scene in the late eighties as a DJ on New York radio station WBLS “In Control with Marley Marl,” which aired every Friday and Saturday night. Their song has been sampled and quoted many times. The chain of musical inheritance doesn’t end with Pete Rock and CL Smooth. Pete Rock’s looping transformed unprominent pieces of Tom Scott’s shaggy improvisation into laser-beam-focused funk. Playing a riff from a chart sounds very different from discovering it in the heat of the moment. They could, in theory, have painstakingly recreated the instrumentation and ambiance from Scott’s original recording, but the result would still not have had the effortless, tossed-off feel of the samples. There’s no other way for Pete Rock to have arrived at his sound, not even if he had hired Tom Scott to come in and play his sax riff live in the studio. “T.R.O.Y.” is a perfect example of why sampling is so valuable. I’ve debated the musical merits of sampling endlessly with my friends and students, musicians and non-musicians alike. The chain of ideas from Jefferson Airplane to Tom Scott to Pete Rock and CL Smooth reminds me very much of the chain from Paul Simon to Bob James to Run-DMC that culminates in “ Peter Piper.” It seems like a recipe for success: golden-age hip-hop group samples jazz fusion cover of sixties pop-rock song. He also wrote the theme songs for Starsky & Hutch, Hill Street Blues and Family Ties.Īnd here’s the original Jefferson Airplane song at the head of this memetic family tree: He’s best known to hippies for playing sax and lyricon on Terrapin Station by the Grateful Dead and has been a session guy on a zillion other albums. Slick Rick used it a year earlier it on “ It’s A Boy.” Hip-hop loves Tom Scott generally–many tracks sample the beat from “ Sneakin’ In The Back.” I had never heard of Tom Scott before writing this post, but I turn out to have heard a lot of his work. Pete Rock wasn’t the first hip-hop producer to have noticed this riff. The Tom Scott record in question is his rendition of “ Today” by Jefferson Airplane. When I mixed the song down, I had Charlie Brown from Leaders of the New School in the session with me, and we all just started crying. Next thing you know, I have a beautiful beat made. I found some other sounds and then heard some sax in there and used that. It had such a beautiful bassline, and I started with that first. When I found the record by Tom Scott, basically I just heard something incredible that touched me and made me cry. And to this day, I can’t believe I made it through, the way I was feeling. I had a friend of mine that passed away, and it was a shock to the community.
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