Of all the J Dilla tributes we’ve seen in the four years since the producer’s untimely death, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s Suite For Ma Dukes project has to be one of the most revelatory/rewarding. Mostly because it gets to the heart of what makes Dilla’s music so great—the grooves themselves, as rendered in brassy jazz arrangements of his productions for Common, A Tribe Called Quest, and more. The video above is from a recent free L.A. concert that featured Flying Lotus and some of his key Cosmogramma collaborators (harpist Rebekah Raff, bassist Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner). We’ve included a free MP3 version after the jump, along with another video and download from a track with Bilal (“Someday We’ll All Be Free”).
If you’d like to actually own pieces of the Ma Dukes puzzle, you’ve got two options: Timeless, a deluxe DVD box set that also includes the works of Mulatu Astatke and Arthur Verocai, or the Suite For Ma Dukes 12-inch that Atwood-Fegurson cut with Carlos Nino. An interview with the latter can be found here.
