T.R.O.Y., the horn loop and who found it first

The horn loop holding up They Reminisce Over You was not found by Pete Rock.

Large Professor found it, in a record shop in the Village, taking a chance on a saxophone album he knew nothing about.

“I remember seeing that Tom Scott record and taking a chance on it, and getting it home,” he says. “I was stuck on that horn loop, though. I would loop that up and be stuck, just listen to that alone and try to filter it.”

The album is The Honeysuckle Breeze, released in 1967 on Impulse!, and the track is Today. It runs three minutes and nineteen seconds.

Listen to the source

The proof it was already in circulation

Large Professor does not tell it as a grievance, and he has a way of showing who got there first.

That horn turns up for a moment on his remix of Slick Rick’s It’s a Boy, which came out before T.R.O.Y..

“There’s evidence. In the Slick Rick remix, which came out before. There is a little clip of the horn. That horn is from the Tom Scott record.”

Then the line that closes the matter: “It was just that ‘Troy’ blew up so much! Pete just went in on Tom Scott, and I didn’t have any problem with it.”

The rest of the record, he adds, was Pete Rock’s work, programming included. That was how everyone did it, in a circle of people passing records between Queens, the Village and Mount Vernon.

Who it was written for

The title is an acronym, and there is a person’s name inside it: Troy Dixon, who danced with Heavy D & the Boyz and went by Trouble T-Roy.

He was from Mount Vernon like Pete Rock, and grew up on the same street.

In July 1990, on tour in Indianapolis, he was outside the arena after the show on a raised exit ramp. Eddie F., who was there, tells it: coming out, you had no sense of being two or three storeys up.

Somebody rolled a garbage barrel down the ramp, Troy got up on the ledge to get out of its way, and fell. He died on 15 July 1990, aged twenty-two.

The day the beat was made

Pete Rock has talked about that track many times, and never as a piece of craft well executed.

I was in depress-mode. To this day, I don’t know how I picked that beat and made that record. But when I found the Tom Scott record, I started to get emotional.

On why the loop ended up there and not on some other track, his explanation runs to one line: “I found a way to give him something, from my heart.”

About the Tom Scott record he says simply that it is one of his favourite jazz tunes.

The single came out on 2 April 1992, the album Mecca and the Soul Brother on 9 June. The track runs four minutes and forty-six seconds.

Listen to what came of it

We played the two tracks back to back and the first time round Tom Scott’s horn sounded like a different thing: on its own it breathes, inside T.R.O.Y. it becomes a paste that does not move a millimetre.

That is the difference between a sample and a loop: one is a fragment, the other is a decision about how long something has to last.