DJ Flow at SFJAZZ · Miles Davis Centennial Series · March 2026

In March 2026, I joined SFJAZZ for Doo-Bop & Beyond: Miles Davis at 100, a night tracing the bridge between Miles Davis and the hip-hop producers he inspired. The event took place at Miner Auditorium, one of the great listening rooms in the country.

The panel featured Easy Mo Bee, the producer behind Miles' final album Doo-Bop, alongside Vince Wilburn Jr., Miles' nephew and longtime drummer, and Donald Harrison, one of the great saxophonists working today. Sway Calloway hosted. I was there as the vinyl DJ, anchoring sets throughout the night that traced the lineage from Miles into the records that sampled him.

Why this night mattered

Miles Davis didn't just influence jazz. He influenced the producers who built hip-hop. The way he approached space, restraint, and tone showed up decades later in the way beatmakers listened to and flipped records. Doo-Bop is the most literal version of that conversation, Easy Mo Bee and Miles in direct dialogue. That's exactly the territory I live in as a selector. The original records and the music they made possible, placed in conversation with each other.

Getting invited into that room, on that stage, with those people. That's twenty years of digging paying off in a single night.

One moment from the panel that's stayed with me. Easy Mo Bee talked about the similarities between working with Miles and working with Tupac, specifically that both of them had the same instinct in the studio. When the verse ended, when the solo was done, they didn't want the tape to stop. They'd tell the engineer to keep it rolling. Whatever came after, the breath, the ad lib, the improvisation beyond the structure, that was part of it too. Neither of them wanted to leave anything on the floor.

That's not a coincidence. That's a lineage. The same creative impulse running from Miles Davis to Tupac Shakur, two generations apart, both understanding that the most honest moment sometimes happens after the planned one ends.

That's exactly what the night was about.

The sets

All vinyl. Jazz into the records that sampled it, tracing the arc from Blue Note and Prestige into the boom bap that grew out of those crates. If you've ever heard a hip-hop track and wondered where that loop came from, that's what the night was built around.