Results for "Robert Glasper"

Robert Glasper

Robert Glasper was raised in Houston, Texas. His mother was his first and strongest musical influence. Mrs. Glasper not only played piano and sang gospel music in the family's church, she led a band that worked the city's jazz and blues club circuit as well. By the age of twelve, young Robert was playing piano in that church. "Gospel music is built on emotion and spirituality; you go to church and leave crying," he says. "It definitely just gave me that sensitivity and knowing how to reach people and knowing how to be in tune with your feelings and the emotion of the music. My thing is, it helps me relate to the audience 'cause they're gonna give you what you give them

Makaya McCraven: Cross Border Traffic

By CHRIS MAY

Like his near contemporaries Shabaka Hutchings, Kamasi Washington, Nubya Garcia and Robert Glasper, the Chicago-based drummer, bandleader, producer and self-declared beat scientist Makaya McCraven is routinely described by the more breathless commentators writing about modern music as a “saviour" of jazz. Certainly, McCraven and his peers are enriching jazz by their embrace of other ...

Jason Moran: Promoting the Freedom Principles

By LEO SIDRAN

Pianist, composer, conceptual artist Jason Moran on truth versus passion, promoting the “Freedom Principles," America's unfortunate way of forgetting the past, when innovation becomes rhetoric, what it means for African American musicians to move freely “from the stage to the table," the power dynamic in choosing repertoire, coming up in Houston among a generation of jazz ...

Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21st Century

By MARK SULLIVAN

Make It New: Reshaping Jazz in the 21st Century Bill Beuttler 304 Pages ISBN: #978-1643150055 (13) Lever Press 2019 Journalist Bill Beuttler modeled this book after Joe Goldberg's Jazz Masters of the 50s (Macmillan Publishing Co, 1965). It devoted a chapter each to a dozen musicians, providing a ...

Blackmantis: Devil's Flower

By CHRIS MAY

Might there be a better time to sit down and listen to an album whose title evokes poet Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, has track titles such as “Lament" and “Dead Leaf" and a PR pitch that talks about the “darker electronic side" of its composer's music, and comes with sleeve art redolent of a ...

20 Seattle Jazz Musicians You Should Know: Rex Gregory

By PAUL RAUCH

The city of jny: Seattle has a jazz history that dates back to the very beginnings of the form. It was home to the first integrated club scene in America, on Jackson St in the 1920's and '30s. It saw a young Ray Charles arrive as a teenager to escape the nightmare of Jim Crow in ...

Robert Glasper: Canvas

By CHRIS MAY

Of the three dozen albums released in Blue Note's 180gm vinyl Blue Note 80 reissue series, Robert Glasper's 2005 debut, Canvas, is the only one recorded in the twenty-first century. Almost all of the other releases were recorded during Blue Note's 1950s and 1960s belle epoque. It is a singular distinction and an appropriate one, for ...

Gegè Telesforo: Improvvisazione senza fine

By PAOLO MARRA

Artista poliedrico e curioso Gegè Telesforo ha mantenuto in più di tre decenni di attività una cifra stilistica originale e autentica. Acclamato innovatore a livello internazionale nell'uso dello scat vocals, nella sua musica le sillabe si muovono libere e sinouse a ritmo di funk e swing in un concentrato raffinato di pura e semplice energia. Musicista, ...

Kendrick Scott: Making Walls into Bridges

By ROB GARRATT

Kendrick Scott authored one of the most compelling jazz releases of last year with A Wall Becomes a Bridge (Blue Note, 2019), a nuanced meditation on identity, history and prejudice, shepherded under the direction of producer and former band mate Derrick Hodge. Pairing gorgeous, searching improvisatory canvases with break beat interludes and samples from guest DJ ...

2020 Winter JazzFest Marathons: A Survival Guide

By LUDOVICO GRANVASSU

Believe it or not, it is that time of the year again! The holidaze are barely over and a new edition of Winter JazzFest is upon us. Knowing a jazz marathon is the perfect antidote to the holiday shopping and social marathons, producer Brice Rosenbloom and his cohorts have put together a program of gargantuan proportions. ...