The Holy Grail might as well have been inside Roland’s trailer at DJ Jazzy Jeff’s latest Playlist Retreat. Those lucky enough to get an invite to the private event, held annually at Jeff’s home in Delaware, got a sneak peek at the Roland TR-1000 Rhythm Creator, the company’s first analog machine in over forty years. Roland marketing director and DJ/producer Matt Chicoine demoed the machine for the crowd, who “oo’ed and ahh’ed” like they were witnessing the Second Coming. A roster of turntablists and producers, including Bay Area legend DJ Shortkut, LA’s Dibia$e, and New York’s DJ Perly, rotated in and out of the trailer, anxious to get their hands on it. They stared in awe as they fiddled with the knobs, basking in the 808 and 909 sounds emanating from the board. sounds emanating from the board. 

“It’s crazy to think that it’s been forty years since Roland has released an analog drum machine,” Playlist Retreat attendee and turntable icon DJ Numark tells Wax Poetics. “The Roland TR-1000 put sound first instead of features. The idea that they expanded the dynamic range of the 909 and 808 built into the unit with the capability to sample made the retreat’s mental gears turn. Many of us were thinking full bandwidth sample packs and drum sounds with outstanding apparent volume. Fly shit!” 

The product demo was only a tiny sliver of the magic happening inside the Playlist Retreat. This year’s event, held from September 21-25, brought together DJs, producers, MCs, singers and other creatives for five days of community building. Attendees, a mix of pillars of the culture and burgeoning artists finding their footing, mingled in the catering tent while DJ Maseo of De La Soul provided the soundtrack. Young Guru casually loaded up a plate, as Mannie Fresh caught a ride on a golf cart. A basketball game took place on an outdoor court positioned right next to Jazzy Jeff’s studio. Nearby, drummer extraordinaire Daru Jones, Jimmy Jam, DJ Premier, Kool DJ Red Alert, and Jazzy Jeff gave each other daps all in the spirit of community.

“At the very first retreat, Lord Finesse looked at all of us and said, ‘You’re like Professor Xavier and we're the X-Men,” Jeff says, referencing the Marvel Comics characters. “And that’s what it started to be—this gathering of the gifted.” 

That was evident during what Jazzy Jeff has christened the “Playlist Challenge.” This year, he split up everybody into twenty teams, and tasked them with creating a song together in less than twenty-four hours. People holed up in their respective areas to write, record and mix their songs. Some didn’t sleep and, instead, worked into the wee hours of the morning. 

“You had to book the studio ahead of time and each team only got an hour,” Daru Jones explains. “Once we got in there around 2 a.m., we found out our files were corrupt, so we had to work around that…What should have been a two-hour job turned into thirteen [laughs]. But I had a dream team of collaborators because everybody contributed equally. Everybody came with their A-game. There was so much adrenaline, you didn’t want to sleep.”

Sleep-deprived but full of perseverance, teams with names like Bread & Butter, Ying & Yang and Ben & Jerry’s presented their songs on closing night. People stood up on their chairs, hands in the air, clapping like they were at a Baptist church service. They exchanged glances like, “Wow, did you hear that!?” Jazzy Jeff stood on stage like a proud father and nodded along to every beat as he watched each creation come to life. His plan for bridging the generational gap was working. 

“Not only do the new attendees or the younger attendees need this, the veterans need it,” he says. “One day I realized that I don't bring the veterans to teach the young kids, I bring the young kids to teach the veterans. What we’ve lost is the courage. We’ve had all of the experience in the world, but we don't jump like we used to when we were younger. I want the veterans to take those risks again.” 

And Jazzy Jeff is certainly a veteran. As one-half of DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, he collected the first Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance in 1989 for "Parents Just Don't Understand.” The duo’s most successful single, 1991’s “Summertime,” earned them their second Grammy and reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming one of the most iconic summer anthems of all-time. The pair were also the third rap group to receive a platinum certification, after Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys. Jeff would go on to platform and help shape Philadelphia’s neo-soul movement in the 1990s and 2000s, producing and developing acts like Jill Scott and Musiq Soulchild under the banner of his production company, A Touch of Jazz. Four decades into a DJ career that has also seen him celebrated for technical innovations like the transformer scratch, Jeff is now in the position to extend his hard-won wisdom to aspiring artists and help mold the future, something he doesn’t take for granted. 

“Most of the people that come to the Retreat are independent artists that have the freedom to create what they want,” he says. “We feel like if we can develop a community and the tools that the independent artists need, they’re OK. What I appreciate with somebody like a No I.D. is he kept speaking art. I've always said the music business is art meets commerce. When the commerce takes control of it, you start to lose the art, you start to worry about things like bots. Like somebody paying for something to be No. 1. What you have here are people whose desire is not to be No. 1. It’s like, ‘I want to get my art out to people who appreciate my art. I want to go on the road and play my art for people who appreciate my art.’ It's not about the chart.”