The Renaissance

Q-Tip’s first solo album in nine years arrived in 2008, two years after Dilla’s death. Several tracks were produced by Dilla before he died, which makes The Renaissance something more than a comeback record — it is a document of two careers overlapping at their endpoints, Q-Tip returning and Dilla no longer able to. The Ummah — the production collective of Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Dilla that had produced Beats, Rhymes and Life and The Love Movement — is present here in its most ghostly form: Dilla’s beats, Q-Tip’s voice, the third member of the trio already gone.

The loop runs: Q-Tip passed Dilla’s demo around after Amp Fiddler walked Dilla onto Tribe’s bus; Dilla got the Labcabincalifornia gig; the Ummah formed; Dilla died. The Renaissance is Q-Tip completing what the Ummah started, with whatever remained of Dilla’s unfinished sessions. The record closes a circle that the 1994 bus encounter opened.