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About 20 days and 20 degrees later, its the last week of June and things have heated up considerably. Summer has officially arrived, bringing with it Madlib's blazing Blue Note remix album Shades of Blue. Invading their vaults, the Beat Conductor reworks the angles with a B-boy edge; classics from Donald Byrd, Horace Silver, Herbie Hancock and Bobbi Humphrey are given a fresh perspective, peppered with chunky drums and KRS-One and Common vocal bites. A couple of weeks later, Dudley Perkins (aka rapper Declaime) sheds A Lit Light, a bizarre neo-soulish album entirely produced by Madlib. "That's some bugged-out shit," says Madlib. "That's Like D'Angelo on crack. Crazy shit." With fast-talking Lootpack MC Wildchild's album Secondary Protocol (half produced by Madlib, half produced by his little brother Oh No) stilt in heavy underground rotation, the year clearly belongs to Madlib. Still to come are his highly anticipated projects with like-minded producer/MCs J Dilla and MF Doom, respectively titled Jaylib and Madvillain.

On the Jaylib project, anytime you hear Madlib rapping, it's a Dilla beat, and vice versa. We're like cousins, musically. We're kind of the same." As for Madvillain, MF Doom came out to Cali and knocked it out in about a week with Madlib in the Bomb Shelter. Doom, who also records under the aliases Viktor Vaughn and King Geedorah, joked with Madlib about their secret identities, with Madlib charting more alter egos than Kool Keith with schizophrenia in a witness protection program. "I made a joke that I'm trying to race him," laughs MF Doom. "Like he's got the Quintet, that's five dudes, and Quasimoto, so he's got like six dudes. I gotta catch up. I need like two more characters!" Actually, Doom will need a few more than that. But there's time.

Time and the underlying spiritual connection between the past, present and future is a recurring theme in Madlib's work. You can see it in the seemingly contradictory name of his jazz outfit Yesterdays New Quintet. On Track 10 of a burned CD-R given to me by an anonymous friend that turns out to be an early Madvillain demos, Madlib/Quasimoto raps, "Today is the shadow of tomorrow/today is the present future of yesterday/yesterday is the shadow of today! the darkness of the past is yesterday/and the light of the past is yesterday." Madlib is the future, but he's the past, too. (Case in point: His family elders were musical folks, as is his 7-year-old daughter, who has already started making beats and writing raps.)

After Madlib came out of nowhere (or you can call it Oxnard, CA) and made his production debut with Tha Alkaholiks' "Mary Jane" in 1993, he could've become just another hungry, hungry hip-hop beatmaker lost in the overstuffed backpack of underground rap. But somewhere along the way, after he and his high school homeys Wildchild and DJ Romes dropped Lootpack's Soundpieces: Da Antidote in 1999, Madlib veered far left, taking a 'shroom-fueled pink Cadillac ride with Quasimoto on 2000's The Unseen.

As his next breakthrough project Yesterdays New Quintet made glaringly obvious, Madlib is really a jazz cat in a hip-hop world, just like Q-Tip, Guru and Pete Rock before him. And it's not just because the Loop Digga dug jazz records searching for sampler fodder; it's also in his lifestyle, it's in his vibes and stuff. He seems to possess an old soul balanced with a child's genuine fascination with a world gone mad around him. Jazz is the same thing [as hip-hop], man, just a different time," Madlib says, finally making eye contact with those oversized, almost cartoonish soul-windows. Them cats lived the same way us hip-hop cats are living. It's a different time, a different beat, but it's the same. It's all the same. I have videos [of jazz documentaries] where it looks like hip-hop cats, but it's jazz cats. Just different times." MF Doom, who as Zev Love X of KMD came up in the hip-hop game during the early '90s, feels that

Madlib is also a missing link to that glorious era of beats, rhymes and life. "That's part of the reason I could really feel his shit," he says. He'll hit me with a beat CD that's got like 100 beats on there and all of 'em sound like they were from that time but were just never heard, you know what I mean? But it's got a little updated twist to it." The next twist - lacing Big Apple big timers Busta Rhymes and Talib Kweli with beats - could take the Madlib Invazion out of the underground and into hip-hop's mainstream world. Kweli, who has been a fan since Tha Alkaholiks' Coast 2 Coast, says, I just like his work ethic along with Jay Dee and other people who stay prolific and keep putting stuff out ... He's just ready to work. Whatever happens with it happens." In-na-in-na-in-na-invasion!

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