Brian Slattery Photo
Ben-Salhuddin.
“Jディラ(Love Dilla)” starts with a stately, old-school groove, straight out of the ’70s. Suddenly it’s chopped up, turned inside out. The tempo speeds up, the old sound made into something new. It becomes a vehicle for a rapper’s insistent voice. It’s a narrative about wrestling demons, about running out of time. “It doesn’t really matter in the end ’cause when it’s said and done / the only one who’s winning in the end is Father Time / I’m truly sorry if I ever had to take your son / I’d send you flowers with a note I wrote, it’s so sublime,” he raps, as the music cascades around him, lush and frantic. He drops out, and makes a drama of being allowed back in to rap some more — which is when the music really gets dramatic.
The lyrically and harmonically dense “Jディラ(Love Dilla)” is from Touchdown: Return of the King, a genre-bending new release coming out Aug. 18 on all platforms from Damani Ben-Salhuddin, a.k.a. D$ the Sax God. In its searching, urgent tone, the album marks the arrival of an artist as comfortable in a jazz mode as he is in a hip hop mode, and particularly agile in exploring the spaces in between, around, and beyond them. But the sound can also be understood as the culmination of being raised in New Haven, and being a part of the network of music education opportunities the Elm City has to offer.
Ben-Salhuddin, who is 22, grew up in New Haven and began playing music as a child, first keyboards, then drums. Then “I started playing sax because I saw some dude with a blue sax — shoutout to that blue sax dude, I forget your name — but … he was a little older than me.” Ben-Salhuddin listened to his playing and decided he needed a saxophone too, “even if it wasn’t blue.” He picked up flute as well. He attended Worthington Hooker School and joined Music Haven in 2008, where he learned to play violin. He got into Co-op High, where his brother had gone as well, and specialized in music.
“That was my thing,” he said. “Every single morning of every single day, we would play scales. Shoutout to Patrick Smith — he was my teacher. For 45 minutes we had to play scales, so I definitely put in my 10,000 hours.” He learned from Jesse Hameen II and the surrounding musicians in the jazz program at Neighborhood Music School, whom he called “silent killers” — people with heavy jazz skills who were also friendly and approachable. While in high school he also reached out to West Coast trombonist Ryan Porter for help arranging one of contemporary jazz great Kamasi Washington’s compositions and now thinks of Porter as a mentor.
After graduating Co-op High, Ben-Salhuddin spent a year at UConn, where he was a member of the school’s jazz ensemble and had a chance to meet Chick Corea. He then applied and got in to Berklee College of Music in Boston, concentrating in music production and engineering. “At first I liked it but then the pandemic hit, and it really changed everything. The entire atmosphere is different.” So he returned to New Haven, hunkered down, and kept making music.
Last year Ben-Salhuddin recorded an album called DRUGS — which stands for “dat real unregulated gangsta shit,” he explained — or WITL, which stands for “a week in the life.” It took about a week for him to make. “Every day I recorded a song and I’d mix it, master it, and drop it,” he said. “It was a good way to archive and see my progress, how my week was going, see my moods and what was going on in my life.” The album let him “sit back and analyze, really put myself in those situations and those days. I really figured something out by the end.”
As pandemic restrictions lifted, he started getting out to play music again (see above for a snippet of a recent solo set at Stella Blues). He also reconnected with musicians here. This past weekend was a case in point; he played at Orchid Café’s jazz brunch in a group headed up by trumpeter William Fluker, playing a soprano sax he borrowed from New Haven musician Will Cleary. “I knew him when I was a little kid, and then we reconnected all these years later and it was like we never missed a day,” he said.
About a year and a half ago, Ben-Salhuddin started making hip hop, developing a style as a rapper and producer in accordance with his own sensibilities. “I was always a jazz head,” he said. “I haven’t really listened to the Tupacs and the Biggies — not in an active way.” Instead, “Kendrick Lamar was my first real introduction” to hip hop, along with Tyler the Creator, “one of my favorite artists.” He recalled Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly coming out in 2015, when he was high school, and “it was my album of the summer.”
“I got a lot of influences,” Ben-Salhuddin said, which means his own music tends to be harmonically and lyrically dense. He makes the beats first, a practice he has grown to love. “I’ll make them in my room, I’ll make them on the bus, outside, roll up onto the roof and make beats. I’ll make beats anywhere. I’ll make one right now. Whenever you get inspiration.”
In coming up with raps to lay over the tops of his grooves, he tries to rap “like a jazz instrumentalist” improvising, finding the holes in the music and filling them with words. “I have a song called ‘Changes,’ ” he said, “because it changes every time you play it.” Music and words are written in the moment — “I’ll sit down and write a verse in 5 or 10 minutes,” he said, then record it right away — and gives himself permission to change it over time. “Nobody can steal your melodies if your melodies are always going to change,” he said. He recalled asking Chick Corea what he thought about songs without melodies. “A song without a melody?” he recalled Corea answering. “Well, that’s not a song.”
“But that’s what I do all the time,” Ben-Salhuddin added with a laugh.
The foray into hip hop has given him a chance to further hone his skills, as someone who likes trying something new, figuring things out. “If you give me something, I’ll either figure out how to use it, or break it and turn it into something I need.” At the same time, he has grown uneasy with the labels of “jazz” and “hip hop” to describe the music he’s making.
“I know this generation oftentimes says ‘I don’t like to be put in a box,’ ” he said, “but for a generation that says that, they put themselves in a lot of categories and boxes — we’re this and we’re that,” from music to identity politics. “It’s just boxes at the end of the day. So I really don’t like to put myself in a box, especially musically. Which I know sounds like a cliche, but it’s true.”
Maybe that’s why Touchdown: Return of the King, with its urgency and ricocheting ideas, feels like a turning point in Ben-Salhuddin’s musical evolution. In writing it, he found that it “was really just about my life. It was my whole entire life boiled down into some music. Everything I’ve been going through and how I feel,” he said.
But it’s also about the present moment he’s in. “That’s how my music comes together. It’s always very spontaneous. I never plan. At the end of the day you got to roll with the punches.”
Ben-Salhuddin is already eager to release more new music, and possibly to form a band of his own. “Time waits for no man,” he said. “Which is a theme, I think, in the album.… You can’t trust or think that you have any amount of time. Time is something that is a gift.” That stance has given him some perspective on what it means to finish a project, even if the way he works allows for the possibility of always changing it, always returning.
“I love to leave a project as is,” he said. “At a certain point you’ve got to stop tinkering, or you just keep working on it and it’s never gonna be right. At a certain point, you got to stop, sit back, and think, ‘yeah, this shit is fire.” Then, he added, “move to the next thing. You got to move to the next thing. You got to move and try not to pass away early.”
Touchdown: Return of the King comes out on Aug. 18 on all platforms. Check D$ the Sax God’s SoundCloud page for previews of the album and past musical projects.