These Days, Everyone’s a DJ – But the Best Are at Jazzy Jeff’s House

As roughly 100 musicians dine on pasta, ramen, and cannabis-infused bento boxes under a massive tent in DJ Jazzy Jeff’s backyard, the hip-hop pioneer announces that the night’s main event is about to begin. He had invited artists across music mediums and generations – including De La Soul’s Posdnous and Maseo, The Roots’ Black Thought, and Jay-Z’s sound engineer Young Guru – to spend three days camped out around his sprawling Delaware estate for his annual Playlist Retreat, resuming for the first time since 2019 after a pandemic hiatus. The exclusive getaway is coveted among those in the know, especially DJs. They all get the chance to connect and create vulnerably, they tell me, especially in the past 24 hours, during which they were strategically assigned to 17 different groups of five, sent to find a corner of the campus to call their own, given a drive of jazz tracks by Max Roach to sample, and tasked to create a song – together, despite their relative unfamiliarity with each other.  Jeff began to blast the results from the dinner-tent DJ booth. As a heavy-hitting amapiano track from a group with Mississippi rapper David Banner and Philly DJ Cosmo Baker turns...