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A Look Back At Robert Glasper's Enoch's "Inaugural" Meditation
by K. Shackelford
One of the most powerful jazz documentation of a Presidential Inauguration was a YouTube presentation of Robert Glasper's “Enoch's Meditation," a piece from his 2005 album entitled Canvas. Glasper, a Blue Note artist and Grammy Award winning jazz piano star, has received critical acclaim for his trio style that weaves together a tapestry of diverse musical genres from rock, hip hop, gospel to even country, staying within the jazz aesthetic in a way that is mind-blowing. Through the ...
Continue ReadingRobert Glasper Experiment: Black Radio 2
by Mark F. Turner
The conditions have to be just right for lightning to strike twice in the same location which holds true for studio recordings where the variables of performers, music, and other factors can affect the outcome. While Robert Glasper's 2012 critically acclaimed Black Radio (Blue Note) deftly combined jazz, hip hop, and “Neo Soul" to win Best R&B Album at the 55th Grammy Awards, its follow up, Black Radio 2, is worthy but won't garner the attention of its predecessor. With ...
Continue ReadingRobert Glasper: Slum Village, Fantastic Vol. 2
by William Ellis
Robert Glasper: Glasgow Jazz Festival, 28th June 2012 The reason this album is special to me is because the producer of the album--J Dilla is my favorite hip hop producer and I got the privilege to actually work with him before he passed away in 2006. To work with him--watch him make music--watch him in “the lab" and see how he works. J Dilla is probably the only producer I know that changed the ...
Continue ReadingRobert Glasper: Temptation Redux
by Anthony King
"Hello world, peace and love--I wish you the best, and now for the next" are the first words uttered with the cadence of a street corner preacher-come poet by Shafiq Hussein, only two bars into Robert Glasper's Black Radio (Blue Note, 2012). As if to lay down the essence of his latest record right off the top, Glasper's piano dances mercurially over Hussein's musings like a skater creating abstract art on glistening ice. The effect is beguiling, sexy and urban ...
Continue ReadingRobert Glasper: Black Radio
by Eugene Holley, Jr.
Depending on your age, Houston-born pianist/composer Robert Glasper is--like trumpeters Christian Scott and Ambrose Akinmusire, and bassist/vocalist Esperanza Spalding-either the herald of a new world a-comin' when jazz musicians will be heard on pop radio on a regular basis, or he's a throwback to the golden age of the seventies, when jazz stars, from Herbie Hancock to Donald Byrd, were played on African-American and pop stations.Blessed with a fleet-fingered, countrified approach to the piano that blends gospel, Thelonious ...
Continue ReadingRobert Glasper: In My Element
by Chris May
Pianist Robert Glasper's embrace of hip hop--which is being foregrounded by Blue Note, presumably as a device to widen his trio's appeal--is, truth be told, overstated going on misleading. For at its core, Glasper's music is everything that hip hop is not, or anyway not what it is perceived to be. In My Element--a wonderfully rounded development of the music presented by the same inventive trio on Canvas (Blue Note, 2005)--is subtle, allusive, rhythmically complex, and understated. And it's all ...
Continue ReadingRobert Glasper: In My Element
by J Hunter
One night in 2006 the Robert Glasper Trio was tearing it up onstage, with pianist Glasper painting hypnotic patterns over the frenetic groove of drummer Damion Reid bassist and Vicente Archer. About an hour in, people started walking out--first in ones and twos, then in groups. It wasn't Ornette Coleman getting punched in the face by a scandalized audience member, but the rebuke was pretty clear. The house was half-full at show's end, and while the trio got a well-deserved ...
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