Songs that sample I Love Music
Ahmad Jamal · 1970 · The Awakening
Pete Rock lifted a few seconds of Ahmad Jamal’s piano — nearly five minutes into a 1970 jazz recording — and built the whole of Illmatic’s best-known beat on top of it.
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I Love Music
Ahmad Jamal · 1970
The World Is Yours
Nas · prod. Pete Rock
What was taken: The piano figure, chopped tight, pitched to sit under Nas and looped as the spine of the beat.
About I Love Music
The piano figure that carries The World Is Yours is not a replay or an interpolation. It is a direct lift from Ahmad Jamal’s 1970 recording of I Love Music, taken from a passage almost five minutes in, well past the point most listeners would ever reach.
What makes it worth hearing side by side is how little Pete Rock changed and how much the change did. The phrase is chopped tight, pitched to sit under Nas, and looped so that a passing moment in a jazz record becomes the spine of the song. Play the origin first and the Jamal phrase sounds incidental. Play the flip straight after and you cannot unhear it.
The flip runs slightly shorter than the source for the same phrase, because Pete Rock sped it up. Nudge the tempo on the origin side and the two lock together.
Every track that samples I Love Music
- Nas — The World Is Yours (1994), produced by Pete Rock. The piano figure, chopped tight, pitched to sit under Nas and looped as the spine of the beat.
More sampled records
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