Like too many young black men before him, underground hip-hop producer J Dilla had to wait until his death to receive the name recognition that eluded him during his short lifetime. Warmly appreciative obituaries of the man born James Yancey and better known as Jay Dee have appeared in daily newspapers, alternative week lies, and Web sites since the Detroit native passed away on February 10 from kidney failure and complications stemming from lupus. Amid the boilerplate push to evangelize his entire body of work with marquee names – such as Common, Erykah Badu, and A Tribe called Quest – his true contributions to hip-hop have been overlooked.Three days before his untimely death, on his 32nd birthday, Dilla released his second solo album. “Donuts” is a smorgasbord of what made him such a singular force, replete with polyglot funk and a sneaky wit.

Overlooking “Donuts” for Dilla’s forest of bigger-name productions is understandable. “Donuts” can feel like a collection of ideas rather than an album proper. Released on LP crate-digging DJ-producer Peanut Butter Wolf’s Los Angeles-based independent hiphop imprint Stones Throw, its 31 tracks rush by in less than 45 minutes. Most songs barely break the minute and a half mark.There are no MC rhymes. No sample repeats its hook into redundancy. And nothing about it could be called “crunk.”

In fact, it’s far too easy to dismiss “Donuts” as a latter-day turntablist album, a producer’s navel-gazing of interest only to other DJs. And it’s in this assumption that Dilla’s deft touch emerges. Unlike the meteoric rise and fall of the DJ-producer as tastemaker (DJ Shadow), Jimi Hendrix (Invisibl Skratch Piklz’s DJ Q-Bert, Kid Koala), and post-structural essayist (DJ Spooky), Dilla doesn’t thread together tracks that are all about himself.

Brevity is the soul of good cheer on “Donuts.” From the first track after the introductory “outro” – the sample-ridden party jam “Workinonit” – “Donuts” shows a hip-hop head operating at the top of his game, even if Dilla recorded it on a laptop from a hospital bed. At 2 minutes and 49 seconds, the buzzing, head-bobbing “Workinonit” is the album’s longest track, and it’s the closest the artist comes to showing off. It’s a sonic blueprint for the entire album. Dilla takes bits and pieces of the contemporary producer’s palette. He massages the seemingly over-mined wells of 1960s jazz, with 1970s soul, 1980s hip-hop, and, being a good son of Detriot, that Motown sound from every era into an infectiously fun product.

From there on, Dilla’s tracks run only 90 seconds or so, because that’s all he needs to express his blithely freewheeling ideas. “Stop!” reconfigures Dionne Warwick’s “You’re Gonna Need Me” into a bouncing, bittersweet life meditation. “The Difference” twists some Kool and the Gang into a roller-skate jam with a Rockettes finish. “Mash” melds a moody, late-night keyboard line to a dance announcer’s voice and finds the perfect vibe right between the dance party and chill-out. And on the “The Twister (Huh, What),” Dilla manages to crib the “Would you join me please in welcoming … ” vocal sample from Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome” into a staccato, busily funky tapestry perfectly at ease without the bark of Chuck D.

Most of “Donuts” plays similar memory games: The recognizable samples come in waves so frequent and fast that the album verges on the nostalgic. What keeps it from casting the golden years of hip-hop in amber are Dilla’s left-field ideas and sense of humor. He turns a piece of Raymond Scott’s spaceage bachelor pad electronic music into Billy Preston-esque outta-space soul in “Lightworks.” On the drolly named “Geek Down,” a wah-wah guitar line and simple drum break transform into a blaxploitation remake of “Psycho.” And, most ridiculously of all, he uses “donut” – yes, the American working stiff’s favorite snack (and his own) – as a metaphysical leitmotif throughout the album, titling one song “Glazed” and another “Time: The Donut of the Heart.”

It’s all the little details Dilla throws in that enable him to hide the album’s greatest achievement in plain sight. He used hip-hop’s basic building blocks and re-combined them into something fresh yet familiar – and did so in a tight, lean sound. It’s the dashing display of the smartest kid in the class goofing off just because he can but not rubbing anybody’s nose in it. Dilla the producer will forever be remembered as the mind who put the warm glow behind the rhymes from the Pharcyde in “Runnin’,” Common in “The Light,” and Q-Tip in “Vivrant Thing.” With “Donuts,” he leaves behind a statement that maps out his vision of hiphop without wasting a single word.