Questlove, who helmed Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius), has paid tribute to the documentary’s subject, Sly Stone, hours after the iconic artist died on Monday. Stone died after a “prolonged battle with COPD and other underlying health issues,” his family shared on Monday. He was 82.

It took the bandleader, who died Monday, just a few years beginning in the late 1960s to write a new language of rock, soul and pop.