Before American Gangster reached stores in 2007, Tommy Brenneck was rehearsing with the Dap-Kings when Roc-A-Fella Records called, and the Brooklyn guitarist got on a train without knowing which of his songs anybody wanted. The record waiting for him was "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)...," produced by Diddy with LV and Sean C of The Hitmen. Its backbone came straight off "Make the Road by Walking," which his Menahan Street Band had released as a single in 2006. The album of the same name followed two years later on Daptone's Dunham imprint.

"JAY Z and the engineer played me the song on the spot, we hung out for a little bit, I played JAY Z some of the Charles Bradley stuff I was working on and then we shook on it," Brenneck later told Life+Times. He described what a songwriting credit on a Jay-Z single meant by the numbers, since his band's records had been selling somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 copies while American Gangster moved a million. "It was a real boost in self-esteem, I tell you that," he said.

Nineteen years after that handshake, the band behind the "Roc Boys" loop is bringing in the composer whose records fed MF DOOM, Ludacris and a generation of crate diggers. On September 8, Menahan Street Band announced Illusions, its fourth full-length album and its first since 2021's The Exciting Sounds of Menahan Street Band. The album arrives November 13 on Brenneck's Diamond West Records, and the lead single "Palace of Illusions" carries string arrangements by the Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai.

Verocai, born in 1945, left engineering school at the end of the 1960s and spent the next few years arranging for some of Brazil's biggest singers. His self-titled album came out on Continental Records in 1972 and went almost nowhere. Critics ignored it and so few people bought it that he gave up a solo career to write and produce music for advertising. He stayed in that work for roughly three decades.

For most of those years very few people owned a copy. That kept the record far from the ubiquity of "Funky Drummer" or "Amen, Brother," two of the breaks on HitsCulture's ranking of the most sampled songs in hip-hop. Ubiquity Records reissued the album on LP in 2003, and producers found it quickly. MF DOOM, recording as Metal Fingers, made "Orris Root Powder" from Verocai's "Na Boca do Sol" in 2005. That same year Little Brother pulled "Caboclo" for "We Got Now" on The Minstrel Show.

In 2008, 9th Wonder's beat for Ludacris' "Do the Right Thang," the track with Common and Spike Lee on Theater of the Mind, was built around that same "Na Boca do Sol." Original Continental pressings turned into collector items along the way, with Discogs reporting a median sale price above $2,500 for the 1972 LP.

ScHoolboy Q, Action Bronson and Your Old Droog have all sampled Verocai since. The renewed attention led to a collaboration with BADBADNOTGOOD on Talk Memory, and Verocai also arranged Tyler, the Creator's score for Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton show in Paris. Adrian Younge, co-founder of the Jazz Is Dead label, told Variety where he thinks the credit belongs. "The love that he's getting right now, if it wasn't for hip-hop, it would not even happen," Younge said.

Menahan Street Band built a long sample sheet of its own over the same stretch of years. Kendrick Lamar used "Tired of Fighting" on "Faith," Kid Cudi rapped "Solo Dolo" over "The Traitor," and 50 Cent took that same song for "Talking in Codes." Eminem flipped "Sleight of Hand" into "Groundhog Day," and Ludacris used "Tired of Fighting" on "Not Long," which puts both of the acts now sharing a tracklist inside one rapper's catalog.

Clearing a sample has only gotten harder since that 2007 handshake. As HitsCulture has reported, the cost of licensing both a master and a composition is pushing producers toward interpolation instead of sampling. A band that writes its own loops sits on the other side of that negotiation.

Brenneck produced Illusions and brought Verocai in himself. "The combination of Verocai's arrangements with Menahan Street Band horn melodies was a total dream for me," he said in the album announcement. "I think it took the music to another level of sophistication that we've never had before." According to the press release announcing the album, the songs were "written and recorded very fast, without any time for second guessing."

The lineup is the same five players who started the group two decades ago in Brenneck's Bushwick apartment, on the street that gave the band its name. Dave Guy plays trumpet with The Roots and in the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, while Leon Michels runs Big Crown Records and still records as El Michels Affair. Drummer Homer Steinweiss and bassist Nick Movshon have played on platinum albums. Brenneck, whose band once backed Charles Bradley, has made records with Baby Rose, Rogê and Kirby, tours with The Budos Band and runs Diamond West Records and its studio.

The ten-song album opens with "Palace of Illusions" and moves through titles like "Aurora Was Her Name," "El-Onta's Dance" and "The Emerald Courtyard" before closing on "City After City." Colemine Records is selling a store-exclusive translucent violet vinyl with a peach swirl, limited to 500 copies worldwide, and the cover art comes from the artist Ariana Papademetropoulos.

Kirby, one of the singers on Brenneck records, is on both of the live dates built around the release. The band plays The Ford in Los Angeles on October 4 with Kirby, Rogê, Sha La Das and DJ Papichampu. On November 19, six days after Illusions comes out, the band is at Webster Hall in Manhattan with Black Thought, Kirby and DJ Edan. That bill puts Guy on a stage with the MC he backs in The Roots.