Before the needle drops, there is a flicker. In the hushed darkness of a theater, or the private cinema of the mind, images move first. They stir a quiet, urgent need. A need for a language beyond dialogue, a feeling beyond the frame. This is where music enters, not as an accompaniment, but as a breath, a shadow, a soul. The history of sound is, in many ways, a love letter to the light of the projector.

This article is Part I of a three-part series exploring how sample culture connects generations of musicians and listeners.

In this first installment, we look at how Ali Shaheed Muhammad, whose work with A Tribe Called Quest helped define the art of discovering and elevating samples, became an early influence on Adrian Younge, and how together they traced the roots of the maestros who would eventually shape the Jazz Is Dead catalog. Many of these artists were first encountered not in record bins, but in the samples woven through the hip hop records that raised us.

In the world of music, we often speak in terms of legacy. We build archives, compile discographies, and honor the giants whose shoulders we stand upon. This work of preservation is vital, a sacred duty. But sometimes, in our focus on the eternal echo of a masterpiece, we can forget the beautiful, fleeting, human moment from which it sprang.

In the spring of 1971, Tina Turner—then performing alongside her husband, Ike, in a partnership that was both professionally brilliant and personally turbulent—embarked on a tour of West Africa with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. She arrived as the incandescent star of a hard-won, uniquely American sound, packaged in sequins and driven by the relentless rhythms of funk and soul. They came to deliver a spectacle, but for Tina, the journey would become a profound personal homecoming—a separate and powerful discovery of the very roots of her own musical and spiritual strength.

When you’re on the road with a legendary band you get to hear a lot of great stories, you get to connect on a personal level with these guys, and have great conversations. In one of these conversations with Kiko Continentino during the latest Azymuth North American tour, a recent list came up — the top 100 Brazilian songs from the 1970s. Kiko mentioned something that stopped me in my tracks: in more than half of those songs, at least one of the original members of Azymuth was playing. That comment opened my eyes to an overlooked truth — the music that defines entire eras often rests on the shoulders of musicians whose names don’t appear in big letters, but whose fingerprints are everywhere.

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