This album turns thirty five. Ron Carter had one question.

I've been sitting with The Low End Theory this week, thirty five years after it came out, and I have to admit it went right past me the first time.

Every dollar I had was going on 12 inches, and in the golden years of hip hop you could be fed on those alone, so by the time I had bought the singles there was nothing left for a full album.

Award Tour was the song that made me want more, but it wasn't until a record pool started servicing me later in my DJ years that I understood how deep Tribe really went.

When I ask friends which Tribe album is their favourite, this is the one that usually comes back, so I went looking for how it was made.

What I found is a record built from the bottom up. Skeff Anselm, who produced two of its tracks, has said Q-Tip wanted the bass as heavy as it could possibly be made.

Bob Power, who engineered it, told The Ringer that the samplers of 1990 didn't have the memory to let them hear everything at once, so they were pulling acoustic bass lines off jazz records that were never meant to sit together and building the songs in their heads first.

Even the title was doing double duty.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad told Talib Kweli that the low end was the frequency, and it was also where people of color had been placed in America.

Then there is the phone call I can't stop thinking about. Q-Tip wanted a real upright bass on Verses from the Abstract, so he called Ron Carter, the man who anchored Miles Davis's second great quintet.

Carter told Gabe Meline at KQED that before he agreed, he asked his son whether this group was unsavory, and then he said yes on one condition, which was that nobody cursed on his track.

They kept their word.

Years later he called them nice kids with real ideas about changes, form and keys, and said he was sorry to see them break up because they were on the right track.

I love that a jazz elder checked with his own kid before trusting a group of young men from Queens, and that it was the kid who helped open that door.