Key Of Grey

April 11th, 2009 – Nujabes is a Japanese hip hop producer and DJ. I first came across his music while watching the fantastic short anime series Samurai Champloo. Honestly, I’m not a huge anime fanatic, but Samurai Champloo had a certain feeling behind it that I really got into. One of the main reasons for that feeling is that the music is extremely important. I feel that the series was almost built around the music; it influenced the actual story with each at equal standing.

Shinichiro Watanabe, who also directed the iconic Cowboy Bebop, used very few artists for the soundtrack. But, in all, there are four full albums worth of material that appeared in the short series. While there are perhaps 4 main producer’s whose work appears in Samurai Champloo, I find Nujabes’ music to be the most representative of the series.

Nujabes’ style can be characterized as down tempo hip hop, with a jazzy feel to it. He samples jazz standards along with using live instrumentation to create a very warm feeling. He is not, by far, the first person to do this, but he is certainly one of the best. Technically, I find his production techniques to be very polished. He was the first person I noticed who used a barely audible looped static sample to bring variety to other repeated loops.

During the time I watched Samurai Champloo, I was writing the soundtrack for a movie. When I go back and listen to the songs I wrote, I can hear the difference where hearing Nujabes actually influenced my own writing and production style. The soundtrack I wrote took 6 months to do, and around halfway, my style becomes more refined as a result of listening to Nujabes extensively. It sounds weird to put that much weight in an artist, but Nujabes was important to my growth; his music made me notice things I hadn’t before. I think all songwriters and producers have that one artist who was influential in their growth and Nujabes is mine.

If you’re interested in hearing more of his music than what I have embedded below in the Mixtape.me player I created a while back, you can check out releases from his independent record label Hydeout Productions. While the songs I embedded of his are instrumentals, his Hydeout releases feature such vocalists as Substantial, Apani B, Funky DL, Terry Collier, and more.