One of my favorite rap songs is “The World Is Yours” by Nas from his classic Illmatic, produced by the great Pete Rock.
Here’s Tracklib’s sample breakdown:
The piano is sampled from “I Love Music” by Ahmad Jamal.
The line “it’s yours” is sampled from “It’s Yours” by T La Rock and Jazzy Jay. (Pete Rock sings the rest of the hook.)
Also in the hook, there’s a pitched-up saxophone squawk on the backbeats; it’s sampled from “Walter L” by Jimmy Gordon and His Jazznpops Band.
There are drums sampled from “Dance Girl” by The Rimshots, but I assume that Pete Rock built the main beat using MPC factory sounds. There are also some brushed drums in the Ahmad Jamal sample.
Finally, there’s a quiet sample of “Nobody Beats The Biz” by Biz Markie – everybody loves to sample this song!
Let’s examine exactly how Pete Rock flipped the Ahmad Jamal sample. Here’s a transcription of “I Love Music” by Rowan Hudson. The sample is at 4:58.
Here’s my simplified chart of the A section, the part that the sample comes from.
There are four phrases of four bars each: in E minor, D minor, C minor, and B-flat minor. Each phrase ends on the V7 chord of the following phrase, except for the last one, which ends on a difficult-to-analyze Ebmaj7 chord. The second chord in each phrase is a richly mysterious minor major seventh chord a half-step below the tonic. In my chart, the sample goes from the beginning of beat two in measure seven to the end of beat one in measure eleven. The loop’s start point is at the beginning of measure nine.
Pete Rock treats the sampled version as if it’s cut time, 80 bpm rather than 160, so you hear the sixteenth notes as swinging rather than the eighth notes. He speeds the sample up to about 87 bpm, which raises its pitch about one and a quarter semitones. Here’s my transcription of the sampled version.
Rowan Hudson’s transcription lists that last chord as (transposed) F#m9. Between the bass note and the chord extensions, that’s how it sounds to me too. If you hear the original Ahmad Jamal tune, you know that the chord is really (transposed) G#7alt/F#, and that it’s part of a ii-V-i in (transposed) C-sharp minor. However, when you hear the sample without its original context, it just sounds like a series of minor chords being planed up and down, which is much cooler than a standard jazz progression would be. Ahmad Jamal seems to go to a lot of trouble to load up his V-i progressions with extensions to cloud their sense of Western tonal function, and I hear this sample flip as Pete Rock finishing the job for him.
Rap producers love Ahmad Jamal. Samples of him appear in “Stakes Is High” by De La Soul, “They Say” by Common, “Soliloquy of Chaos” by Gang Starr, and “Solace” by Earl Sweatshirt, among many other songs. “The World Is Yours” is not the only song to feature a sample of “I Love Music”, either. Here’s “Me or the Papes” by Jeru the Damaja.
Here’s “She Said It’s Ok” by Blu & Exile.
And here’s “Keepthtup” by Knxwledge.
It’s remarkable how different all these tracks sound from each other. “I Love Music” has so many different moods and textures that you’d probably never get tired of flipping different parts of it.
Long before rap existed, Ahmad Jamal was also the source of two massively impactful “samples” by other jazz musicians. “So What” by Miles Davis and “Impressions” by John Coltrane both draw on Jamal’s recording of “Pavanne” by Morton Gould. Jazz critics and historians have not tended to hold up Jamal as a central figure, but maybe we should take our cues from the artists on this one.