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Karriem Riggins
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“Supremely creative drummer and beatmaker Karriem Riggins is a rare musician with concurrent jazz and hip-hop résumés that are equally impressive. The Detroit native got his start in jazz with singer Betty Carter and first saw his name in liner notes — including those for pianist Mulgrew Miller’s Getting to Know You — the year he turned 20. His longstanding partnership with rapper Common began a couple years later and covers a decades-spanning wealth of projects highlighted by albums such as Black America Again and August Greene, the latter of which arrived on the heels of their Emmy-winning song “Letter to the Free.” Through Common, Riggins also collaborated extensively with Jay Dee, aka J Dilla, his primary inspiration as a hip-hop producer. The two are linked by The Shining, a posthumous Dilla album that Riggins completed at the behest of his beatmaking mentor. While Riggins has never recorded as a leader, he has released a couple whimsical hip-hop production showcases, Alone Together (2012) and Headnod Suite (2017), on Stones Throw Records. He followed two jazz albums as one-half of Jahari Massamba Unit (beside Madlib) with To the Jungle (2024), a set of library-style drum tracks. Roy Hargrove, Diana Krall, Paul McCartney, and Steve Lacy are also among the genre-spanning list of artists with whom Riggins has worked.
A Detroiter by birth, Karriem Riggins is the son of Emmanuel Riggins, a keyboardist, arranger, and producer who performed and recorded with Grant Green and Marcus Belgrave. The younger Riggins studied trumpet with Belgrave before he focused on drums, by which point he was already an avid fan of hip-hop. While attending Southfield High School in suburban Detroit, Riggins joined Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead, an association that opened more doors. Riggins’ first three commercially issued dates as a sideman appeared in 1995. Stephen Scott Trio’s Renaissance and Roy Hargrove’s Family featured him on a track apiece. The third, Mulgrew Miller’s Getting to Know You, involved him from front to back. After a gig with Hargrove, Riggins met rapper Common, and the two soon forged a lasting bond. Riggins produced, co-wrote, and played drums on the finale of Common’s 1997 album One Day It’ll All Make Sense, then recruited and led Com’s backing band on a subsequent tour. Before the end of the ’90s, Riggins had also supported pianists Eric Reed and Benny Green, bassists Ray Brown and Rodney Whitaker, and singer Leena Conquest, among others.
Riggins swung more freely between the jazz and hip-hop worlds during the 2000s. At the dawn of the decade, he reprised his role from One Day It’ll All Make Sense for Common’s Like Water for Chocolate. The bulk of that album was produced by Slum Village member Jay Dee, aka J Dilla, who taught Riggins — a student of the fellow Detroiter’s inventive beatmaking — how to use the Akai MPC3000 sampler and drum machine. The respect was mutual. Dilla sought Riggins to play drums on the Slum Village track “2U 4U,” and for his 2001 solo album Welcome 2 Detroit, he included Riggins’ first commercially released beatmaking effort, an obliquely funky track titled “The Clapper,” and additionally had Riggins play drums and percussion on “Rico Suave Bossa Nova.” Also in 2001, Riggins produced the Slum Village remix of Daft Punk’s “Aerodynamic.”
Over the next few years, he lent his talents to material by Common, Slum Village, Dwele, and the Roots. He was heard on more jazz dates led by Mulgrew Miller and Ray Brown, and was a major factor in Carl Craig’s genre-blurring Detroit Experiment, part of an all-star Motor City cast that included Marcus Belgrave. Deeper into the decade, Riggins was asked by the ailing Dilla to complete the album that became The Shining, released in August 2006, six months after Dilla died from cardiac arrest. Riggins subsequently worked with Dilla associate Erykah Badu, producing “Soldier” and “Fall in Love (Your Funeral),” and occupying the drum stool for Timeless: Suite for Ma Dukes, Migel Atwood-Ferguson’s orchestral tribute to Dilla and Maureen Yancey.
In 2012, after playing on Paul McCartney’s Kisses on the Bottom, Riggins finally released recordings of his own through Stones Throw. Coincidentally, the label had released a compilation featuring a track by one of his father’s bands, the Wooden Glass (The Funky 16 Corners). Riggins’ abstract, sample-heavy beat collages — close in spirit to Dilla’s Donuts, and sometimes incorporating live instrumentation — formed the basis of Alone and Together. The sibling volumes were released on vinyl and as digital downloads, and were combined for compact disc as Alone Together. The project fittingly ended with a track titled “J Dilla the Greatest.”
Riggins was credited on a wide variety of recordings over the next few years by Theo Croker, Diana Krall, Kanye West, Esperanza Spalding, and Norah Jones, among others. He also continued to work closely with Common and produced the entirety of the rapper’s Black America Again, which featured a song co-written by Tanisha Riggins, his sister. Still affiliated with Stones Throw, he delivered Headnod Suite, another beatmaking showcase, in February 2017. That September, Riggins, Common, and keyboardist Robert Glasper (another Dilla acolyte) won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music & Lyrics with “Letter to the Free,” written and recorded for Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th. The same trio subsequently released a self-titled album under the name August Greene. It arrived in 2018, the same year Riggins produced Indigo, the second Blue Note album by singer/songwriter and pianist Kandace Springs.
Back in 2007, Riggins was featured on the Madlib-produced compilation Yesterdays Universe!, more specifically on a track credited to Jahari Massamba Unit. Madlib and Riggins reactivated the name in 2020 with Pardon My French, and in 2024 released YHWH Is Love, a second LP under the alias. Between those releases, Riggins worked extensively again with Common and continued his lasting association with pianist/singer Diana Krall. A wider variety of collaborative and session work occurred with the likes of Halsey, Steve Lacy, Nicholas Payton, BadBadNotGood, and Fousheé. Additionally in 2024, Riggins released To the Jungle, a drums-forward volume in Madlib’s Madlib Invazion Music Library Series. The next year, Riggins, Common, and Patrick Warren scored the second season of the Netflix series Mo. Riggins, joined by Busta Rhymes and Westside Gunn, commemorated what would have been J Dilla’s 51st birthday that February with “Long Live J Dilla.””