20-YEARS OF DONUTS WITH DEZ ANDRES

Twenty years after its release, Donuts remains one of the most quietly radical albums in recorded music, a 31-track fever dream assembled by James Dewitt Yancey in a hospital bed, racing against a rare blood disease, working from a portable SP-303 and a stack of crates. Detroit gave the world J Dilla, and in doing so gave us a blueprint for how feeling could be encoded into rhythm, something bruised and elastic, simultaneously grief-stricken and joyful, never quite landing where you expect. Donuts wasn’t just a hip-hop album. It was a transmission. And two decades later, that signal is still reaching people. Dez Andres carries that transmission forward with an authority that few can claim. As a member of Slum Village, the group Dilla himself co-founded, Dez isn’t performing tribute so much as continuing a conversation that was never finished. He is a direct line to that Detroit legacy: the boom-bap warmth, the crate-digger’s reverence, the understanding that a dance floor and a listening room don’t have to be separate places. That same spirit threads through the Bay Area artists joining him, DJ heyLove*, Max Kane, DJ Traps, DJ Osé, and SETI-X (MC-Host), each of whom has spent years weaving house, soul, beats, and hip-hop into the fabric of this community, holding space for the heads and opening doors for anyone hearing Dilla’s name for the first time. This is the Unabridged campaign doing what it was built to do, tracing the full story of Black musical genius across cities and generations, refusing to let the connective tissue go unnamed. Dilla’s voice belongs in that story. His influence runs through every corner of what we play and how we play it, and this night is our way of saying so out loud. Come to learn, come to celebrate, come to dance, there will be plenty of all three.