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.

Reminisce over you