Janko Nilovic, the 80-Year-Old Composer Sampled by Jay-Z & Dr. Dre

French composer and arranger Janko Nilovic lives like his best work is still ahead of him. At 80 years old, Nilovic has no intentions of retiring. He’s lost neither his joy nor his passion for composing, despite having recorded 30-plus albums since the late 1960s that effortlessly blend soul, jazz, funk, psychedelia, and classical. But his most celebrated work is filed in the genre commonly referred to as “library music”—music that could be licensed for use in radio, TV, and film. Later, library music became core to the development of hip-hop; Nilovic’s work has been sampled nearly 60 times, and he scored a Grammy nomination for No I.D.’s use of one of his pieces in Jay-Z’s 2009 song D.O.A. (Death of Autotune). Dr. Dre sampled Nilovic’s Underground Session for a beat on his 2015 album Compton, and samples of his work have appeared in songs by The Alchemist & Freddie Gibbs, Yr Old Droog, The Beatnuts, Joey Bada$$ & Schoolboy Q.