“It started out as a beat thing,” explains Mr. Walt, one half of the veteran hip-hop production crew Da Beatminerz along with his brother Evil Dee. “When I first took production seriously, I was working at Music Factory in Jamaica, Queens. That line Q-Tip says on ‘What’ off Low End Theory — ‘What’s Music Factory without Mr. Walt?’ — that was me. Even though I was older than he was, I saw what Tip was doing, and I was like, ‘Wow, they’re not using regular breaks. They’re using breaks that nobody ever heard of and going at them hard.’ So we began looking in the jazz department for beats and it led us directly to Blue Note.” [go the article]