Riggins is one of those drummers who sounds relaxed even when he's doing something technically demanding. There's no showboating, no moment where he seems to be reminding you he went to music school. He plays behind the beat in a way that feels deliberate rather than sloppy, and that pocket — that slightly laid-back, weighted feel — is probably the thing that made producers like Madlib and Questlove take notice. He fits into hip-hop production contexts without sounding like a jazz drummer doing an impression of a drum machine.

His jazz credentials are genuinely impressive and came early. Playing with Ray Brown and Tommy Flanagan in his mid-teens wasn't just good experience — it was an education in taste and restraint from two musicians who had very little patience for excess. That kind of training shows. Riggins doesn't overplay. When you listen to him in a straight jazz setting, you notice what he doesn't do as much as what he does.

The producer side of his career is where things get interesting for people who don't follow jazz closely. His work with Common on Be (2005) helped define a certain sound for that era of conscious hip-hop — warm, live-feeling, rooted in soul and jazz samples but without the dusty crate-digger aesthetic. He and Madlib have long been in each other's orbit in ways that cross-pollinate both their work. His own production project, released as Alone Together (2012), showed he could hold an album together as a solo statement rather than just a sideman or collaborator.

What makes him genuinely interesting is the absence of any anxiety about genre. A lot of musicians who straddle jazz and hip-hop make a point of it, treating it like a political statement or a brand. Riggins just does it, and the music doesn't feel like a manifesto. He'll play a straight-ahead gig, go produce a rap record, and neither one sounds like he's visiting from the other world. Detroit does that to people — the city's music history is so tangled up between Motown, techno, jazz, and gospel that compartmentalizing probably never made much sense to someone who grew up there.

If you're coming to him fresh, Alone Together (2012) is a good starting point for the producer side, and tracking down live recordings with Diana Krall — whose band he played in for years — shows you the drummer without any studio polish. He's the kind of musician who rewards attention across multiple contexts rather than one definitive album.