Reviewed by Noah Goodbaum | Photography by Philip Litevsky

We know him well, we hip-hop fiends. And nearly every last one of us tingles with joy at the mere mention of his name. For a whole generation of die-hard partisans of the boom bap, the words “produced by Pete Rock” elate us like nothing else, and with good reason: along with his peers (he has a number of equals, but no superiors) he’s our very own street-corner Mozart, a man peerlessly adept at crafting intricately layered slices of pocket-size transcendence. Sure, there’s no denying his bare-bones mic skills, but it hardly matters: seldom has a second’s worth of a Pete Rock beat been wasted. So one didn’t have to think too hard about whether to attend his Fever throwdown on August 3: you knew shit was gonna be off the chain.

The atmosphere was nothing short of electrifying. Throngs of pretty party people packed the dance floor tighter than a Windsor knot, and more than a dozen kick-ass breakers formed a circle and commenced to bust moves awe-inspiring enough to send jaws crashing through the floorboards. And then, at last, enter the mack: braying and grunting, seemingly zooted off his ass, the Chocolate Boy Wonder was a bizarre sight to behold, but he rocked the ones and twos with abandon. We got some slick R&B, we got some sneak previews of the cuts on his new joint (slated to feature Redman, Little Brother, MF DOOM, and, er… Jim Jones), we got an inordinate number of jams by the ever-undervalued Lox (all right kiddies, repeat after me: “‘Cause when my coke come in, they gotta use the scale that they weigh the whales with!”) And, of course, we got the requisite medley of timeless Pete Rock wonderments.

The man’s MCs seldom sounded better than when they were going utterly bananas, and the evening’s jams manifested that principle in full: not only did we get CL Smooth (a onetime rhyme dynamo who, sadly, has fallen off harder than Wile E. Coyote over the edge of a cliff) bobbing and weaving, ducking and diving his way through “Straighten It Out” like the nimblest of prizefighters, but we also got the cream of Pete’s storied cadre of lose-your-shit-incredible remixes: A.D.O.R.’s joyous “Let It All Hang Out”, Chuck D’s earthshaking foghorn baritone over “Shut ‘Em Down”, and, most triumphantly, the bugfuck crazypants genius of Das EFX’s “Jussummen”, all staccato horn blasts and rhymes straight from the stream-of-consciousness loony-bin.

And then there’s “T.R.O.Y.” Fifteen years on, it’s something like a secular hymn; measured, heartrending, with that soaring sax sample whose ebullience just about matches the sun. CL’s spitting tender odes to his Uncle Sterling and Aunt Joyce, and keeping the memory of slain Trouble T-Roy dear to his heart, but this song is for our loved ones, too, written for us and ours just as much as for he and his. It’s as glorious an affirmation of life and love as any work of art ever produced, and to hear the man behind it crank it loud at 2 AM on a Saturday night goes a long way toward making it feel like we live in a beautiful world.

View all the pictures from the show here.