DISCOGS | You Should Know Bob James, the Most Sampled Jazz Artist of All Time
Keyboardist Bob James has been sampled in hip-hop classics from Run-DMC’s “Beats to the Rhyme” to Eric B. and Rakim’s “Follow the Leader.” An agogô-bell breakbeat from one of his recordings has propelled tracks by N.W.A. and A$AP Rocky. No jazz artist has been sampled more than him. The term “godfather of hip-hop” has even been tossed around.
Which means he had a profound relationship with rap and hip-hop back when all these songs were released, right?
“Zero. I didn’t have any relationship with it,” the 80-year-old deadpans to Discogs from his lakefront home in Northern Michigan. “I wasn’t very interested in that genre. I was deep in my own work, and in my time away from listening to jazz, I was listening to classical music.”