The Soul Brother. Boom bap's most sampled sampler.
Pete Rock is half of Pete Rock & CL Smooth and one of hip-hop's most influential producers, full stop. "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)," released April 2, 1992 as an Elektra 12" ahead of the album, is his signature: a tribute to Trouble T Roy of Heavy D & the Boyz, built from a loop of Tom Scott and The California Dreamers' 1967 cover of Jefferson Airplane's "Today." Pete Rock flipped that same source two more times on the same album, on "Return of the Mecca" and "Skinz" — three different chops of one loop, and none of them sound repetitive.
Mecca and the Soul Brother, the album built around T.R.O.Y., dropped June 9, 1992 on Elektra and is a cornerstone of golden-era boom bap: dense soul horns, drums mixed loud and dry. The Main Ingredient followed on November 8, 1994, also on Elektra — a tighter, moodier record and the duo's final album together, still underrated relative to Mecca.
Pete Rock's solo debut, Soul Survivor, arrived November 10, 1998 on Loud/RCA, almost entirely self-produced. His outside production work runs deep too: he produced Nas's "The World Is Yours" (1994, Columbia), built from an Ahmad Jamal loop, and spent the mid-1990s on InI's Center of Attention, a shelved group album that finally surfaced in 2003 on BBE's Lost & Found: Hip Hop Underground Soul Classics. Deep-catalog territory for collectors chasing the full production discography, not just the CL Smooth albums.
Compare live listings for these records on Discogs, eBay, and CDandLP:
Search Pete Rock vinyl