Credit: Alamy

Just Blaze isn’t necessarily one of the most famous names in hip-hop, but he is up there alongside some of the most influential producers in the genre’s history.

His work with Roc-a-Fella Records during the early 2000s was especially important because of his pioneering the development of the so-called “chipmunk soul” style of sampling, in which vocals are sped up to the extent that they sound a bit like the songs of Alvin and the Chipmunks, hence its moniker.

That was a common feature of 2000s rap, and while it has certainly fallen out of flavour since then, Just Blaze’s innovations have been far greater than the development of that one style.

Bearing that in mind, here are five of his best instrumentals.

Five genius Just Blaze instrumentals

5. ‘Song Cry’ – Jay-Z (2001)

Featured on Jay-Z’s sixth album, The Blueprint, ‘Song Cry’ bagged a Grammy nomination for ‘Best Male Rap Solo Performance’ and, ultimately, helped to establish Just Blaze as one of the greatest producers around. It samples a track called ‘Sounds Like a Love Song’ by Bobby Glenn, but it’s not exactly a cut-and-paste job.

The sampling in this song is incredibly intricate, as Blaze himself noted during a conversation in 2011 with Complex. “‘Song Cry’ is probably the most complex song on [The Blueprint],” he said, “Originally when I did it, I had straight drums and that singing sample all the way through. I literally had 96 sample traps in that beat.” This is where his genius truly shines, as he notes, “If you listen to it, it sounds seamless. It sounds like one long smooth thing, but that’s literally 96 sample chops all being triggered in that beat.”

4. ‘Boy (I Need You)’- Mariah Carey (2002)

If ‘Song Cry’ was a huge feat of technical proficiency, this next one was a much simpler affair. Just Blaze is known mostly for his hip-hop collaborations, but he has also worked with out-and-out pop superstars, and they don’t come much bigger than Mariah Carey.

Blaze was brought on board for her ninth album Charmbracelet, where he worked on the track ‘Boy (I Need You).’ Released in 2002, the song was a reworking of Cam’ron’s song ‘Oh Boy,’ which had been released earlier that same year. “Basically, ‘Oh Boy’ was a huge smash, and she just wanted to get in on it,” Blaze explained to Complex, adding, “She loved the record, and she was trying to get in on that sound. All I did was take ‘Oh Boy’ and add chords to it. She wrote the song, and that went by really quickly.” Simple, but effective.

3. ‘I’ma Bang’ – DMX (2001)

Just Blaze’s session with DMX, as work began on the rapper’s fourth album, The Great Depression, started out with something approaching tension. “I walk in,” Blaze recalled to Complex, “and he’s got liquor in one hand and weed in the other. He handed me a blunt, and I’m like, ‘I don’t smoke’. He said, ‘DRINK?!’ I was like, ‘No’.” They got into what might have become a concerning tussle of egos, but DMX’s surprise at producers in general not indulging in drink or Mary Jane, and Just Blaze’s candid counter with why that was an issue, but all threats were quickly dispelled.

DMX apparently stepped back with, “Ah, I don’t know about you”, following which he started laughing. Thankfully, they actually did get along well enough to make ‘I’ma Bang’ together, and that was that. “He was mad cool,” Blaze said of DMX, “I’d only met him that one day, and I never saw him again or after. That was the only time we ever met.”

2. ‘Freedom’ – Beyoncé featuring Kendrick Lamar (2016)

Another pop superstar for whom Just Blaze has created music is Beyoncé, after he helped put together her track ‘Freedom’, which also featured Kendrick Lamar. The song appeared on 2016’s Lemonade and contains several obscure music and audio samples.

Speaking to Spin about the making of the track, Blaze recalled how Beyoncé was already working on a demo record she had when she realised she needed Just Blaze’s signature on it, noting, “It’s like the prototypical Just Blaze sound: the whole ’60, ’70s [sampling], super-hard drums, feels like it should be played in the stadiums, sample chops, things of that nature. As she was working on it, I get a call, ‘Beyoncé has this record’.” Obviously, he answered her call curious, and once she gave him “all the parts”, they “knocked it out pretty quickly”.

1. ‘Touch The Sky’ – Kanye West/Ye (2005)

‘Touch the Sky’ is maybe the most recognisable track from Ye’s legendary second album Late Registration, and, arguably, it is the most recognisable instrumental Just Blaze has ever produced. But, unlike so many of the samples he used to create it, the source is almost instantly recognisable: ‘Move On Up’ by Curtis Mayfield. “The funny thing is,” Blaze later noted of the track, during a lecture he gave at the 2006 Red Bull Music Academy, “as popular as ‘Move On Up’ by Curtis Mayfield is, I’d never heard that song before… I found a CD in my house or something, I had a greatest hits, and I just threw it on…”

He was pleasantly surprised that he had heard all the other songs in the album apart from this one. “Now, had I heard it and knew how popular it was, I probably wouldn’t have touched it. But I did it…,” he admitted. That shows just how tenuous moments of genius can sometimes be. Had Blaze known how famous ‘Move On Up’ was, he may not have produced a song that helped to send then-Kanye West into the stratosphere.