Robert Glasper

He crashes enough other people's threads... Time for a thread of good Glasper music and/or opinions? He comes across as a hugely interesting figure (never mind influential), just by being such a great believer in combining popular and highbrow – from his many collaborations, to his jazz piano solo work, to the Black Radio albums and the upcoming compilation album Too NPR for ILM (not done yet).

As he says, today "we have so much more music to be influenced by than our precedessors... our stuff is supposed to sound different and be mixed-up". And then he's like "This is Drake".
https://soundcloud.com/user-569023993/robert-glasper-and-jason-morans-mp3-shuffle-bbc-jazz-on-3-august-3rd-2015 - from BBC Jazz on 3

Ha ha. Love that album title

Listening to Covered this morning and enjoying it, though I get why the P4k complained that it was too sedate or whatever. Jazz covers of Radiohead are kind of a cliche at this point, but I like his take on "Reckoner." Also, a Jhene Aiko song!

https://twitter.com/kobebryant/status/689137205575483392

I think I've said this elsewhere but I think Glasper is the most important guy in jazz right now

(btw, can't find it right now, but that "be courageous" thing is not RG's first take on that; i've definitely heard that tune on one of his earlier albums)

New Orleansian trumpet player Christian Scott was giving love to the city of Houston, Texas, onstage the other night saying it is responsible for a number of the most happening folks these days in jazz and jazz related music. He named off a bunch of names fast including Glasper, Jason Moran, and Scott's bass player plus others (did not catch em all).

Chris Dave is from Houston too.

I dunno, most of this sounds I dunno Slum Village b-sides, I don't get what's so great about it, I mean it's pleasant and all

fork like you call him a genius and the most important jazz dude and i just just don't hear it? like even with (EXTREMELY LIMITED) knowledge feels like Makaya McCraven and Kamasi Washington's most recent ablums just destroy this

i prob need to hear more of his stuff. hes good at what he does. but i feel like a lot of his stuff is just picking up from where someone like roy hargrove left off. jazz-meets-neo soul, etc. maybe hes the important jazz musician around right now for the high profile position hes in. weird though that for all his highbrow meets lowbrow or whatever, he often seems to end up just a bit middlebrow.

yeah like he's fine but i dunno i guess i feel like "jazz interacting with hip hop" as progressivism seems really stale, esp when the general aesthetic is 15-20 year old backpacker stuff, compared to say The Thing & Neneh Cherry feels really bracing....or ppl like Matthew Shipp or Ken Vandermark, or shit like even ppl shit on the Bad Plus but I find their kinda diffuse Vince Guaraldi goes free jazz and cover the alt rock classics deal ok at times

yeah, i guess if you really loved jazzmattazz and needed to hear something newish along those lines, glaspers your man, but its basically the same mode, just re-fitted for the post-dilla kids (or rather, ageing rap fans). the chance the rapper does jazz+hip hop slightly more progressively. but still, glasper might want to engage less with dilla, more with metro boomin or southside, if he really wants to get 'progressive'. all that said, its nice enough. i cant knock it too much. i like his sound. even if i wouldnt call it all that ambitious.

matt otm, his most modern shit was the trio with Chris Dave, before the Black Radio albums, and the recordings don't match the live footage.

Makaya's records are very exciting in terms of approaching jazz with a sample-based mentality, without actually trying to sound like hip-hop.

was it you that brought up makaya on the kamasi thread? if so thanks love "in the moment"

no, i remember posting about it on the jazz thread though. there was an interesting nyt live review recently talking about how he chopped up live recordings to make the record, and is now taking those chopped vamps as the starting point for the live show and finding ways to string them together.

not that this is necessarily a radical new technique but i appreciate his loop-based approach to acoustic jazz.

fork like you call him a genius and the most important jazz dude and i just just don't hear it? like even with (EXTREMELY LIMITED) knowledge feels like Makaya McCraven and Kamasi Washington's most recent ablums just destroy this
― rockpalast '82 (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, June 15, 2016

ok this is all somewhat overgeneralizing, but my perspective on this is that glasper was one of the few and only popular (whatever that's worth) jazz musicians seriously and meaningfully exploring the intersection of rap and jazz back in 2006, a time when there was little, if any, porousness between the two genres; the generally prevailing marsalis view of jazz as america's classical music allowing no crossover or interest to hip hop heads aside from sampling. as far as there is a current renaissance of the synthesis of the genres (and the people you're namechecking are a sort of proof that there's an audience there), glasper strikes me as one of the absolute key figures and one of the few people that saw the next steps. ime, he's deeply appreciated in both worlds as a trendsetter and a musician. to be honest, I have really been too busy to even crack the miles album but I'm looking forward to seeing him live next week for the tenth or so time... jordan's right that he's best in concert. The sampling elements can often be enjoyable but he's just an incandescent performer and his combo is spectacular.

as far as "the most important jazz dude", I guess i feel that way about him more as an industry and as a thus far somewhat underheralded historical figure: the two prevailing attitudes I've run into for over a decade with people who care about jazz music is classicism ("this music must be preserved, the precious unchanging tradition played and replayed", often tied up with issues of race or historicity) or progressivism (abstract, noise, multiculturalism, new directions, super-niche audiences, generally primarily white college audiences). in either case, there's a can we say "rockist" importance placed on mastery, pedigree, lineage, playing chops. Neither stream gave hip hop much attention, even though it's the dominant pop music of the young millennium. Glasper, as long as I've known, did and he leaned heavily into the soulquarian, r&b, backpack world and accepted that trade off as a two way street. i'm sure there were other guys doing that but i didn't see anyone else in the aughts and teens in NYC who did. he's keeping a tradition alive by moving it forward and obviously, that speaks to me. i'm deeply pleased that he's developed into the kind of jazz artist who can play a ticketed show in Harlem or Hoboken or Brooklyn and pull a primarily black, all-ages audience of thousands of people. I can't think of any other contemporary guys who can do that.

glasper also is a solid composer, an excellent collaborator and a great performer; the left handed "pleasant" comment speaks to why I think he's not taken as seriously as i think he should be: his lyricism of playing, his accessibility and smoothness on record tends to leave critical listeners nonplussed. personally, i like complexly lyrical (i'm thinking ahmad jamal and charles lloyd and andy bey here) and while i can get how it's easy to dismiss a lot of his work as soft, I would suggest a less cursory reading will pay off if you give it time.

i'm also willing to cop that all these OPINIONS may be a product of my NYC-entrism; maybe there was a huge movement in paris or minneapolis or chicago or whatever and RG is the tip of that iceberg that i saw. but i keep seeing glasper's name popping up where the music is moving forward the culture and his shows are always A+ and his collaborators are diverse and meaningful (dude got a cosign from Bill Withers on his album! nobody gets that!) so i give him a lot of respect.

i actually feel like i've given him a good listen and tbh i think i have found he's on a downward trajectory for me

i have not seen him play live, i don't doubt he's great

i'm sure there were other guys doing that but i didn't see anyone else in the aughts and teens in NYC who did

yeah but like the jazzamatazz comment upthread rings true, it was all over the 90s so it's not like he invented it, if you like him carrying on in that tradition that's cool but to use the word "genius" in jazz i feel like then you're necessarily putting him on the level of like the titans or someone who genuinely moved the music in a new way.

i feel like i'm coming off more negative about glasper than i am, i just think this new one is kinda eh imo

in either case, there's a can we say "rockist" importance placed on mastery, pedigree, lineage, playing chops.

who said he didn't have any of these things??? not copping to the "rockist" tag on this sorry

also i would hardly say kamasi is at odds w/the hip hop community given his associations and his live show is way more hip hop influences and funk influence in parts that the album would indicate

my thing with Kamasi is that his music is more retro/'70s throwback than any of the folks being talked about, and his moment is mostly due to his associations (and btw Fly Lo and Thundercat love '70s jazz fusion too but do more to modernize it imo). it's good, just not as interesting to me personally.

who said he didn't have any of these things??? not copping to the "rockist" tag on this sorry

to use the word "genius" in jazz i feel like then you're necessarily putting him on the level of like the titans

i would hardly say kamasi is at odds w/the hip hop community

i actually want to apologize because i actually like glasper overall and like you said it's good he's a jazz artist that's getting out of that zone a bit (like kamasi too)

but the new album i dunno, like this song...say this was some randos and called "They Can't Hold Me Down" by Poetical Knowledge feat. Word Born, would you even notice it as anything more that pleasant backpacker?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajIovkNUbO8

whereas these feels more like merging two vibes of a live band jazz and hip hop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pumWJ4N7rNc

like i say, i haven't listened to the new album yet; the cut you posted is pleasant enough but yeah it ain't groundbreaking.
with the black radios, their accessibility and almost flippancy as regards genre is part of the appeal to me; they're solid pop jazz aimed at an audience that digs head wrap R&B and respectfully asks them to work a little to meet halfway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA81bMvO2_o

yeah i like black radio

basically this is how i break it down to an extent, i feel like these type of collab heavy concepts often start out pretty inspired and end up devolving into tony bennet + [popular singer right now] type formulas & and i hope we don't lose the jazz aspect to the point where glaspar is just making solid neo-soul/boho rap compilation albums....like taking a left turn might be a good thing right now, though if as you say he's developing and actual big non-jazz following that might be hard

i think he manages both audiences pretty well; i don't mean to insinuate that he's ignoring one direction or another.
if you'd like to try some more contemporary JAZZ jazz work on his behalf, try the Covered album from last year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQuFyUIAlrs

also it likely goes without saying, because i've only seen him live a bunch and bought the t-shirt, but i'm not glasper's svengali and we've never even talked before so these are just my interps of the directions i've seen his work go in over the past decade. He's got his own masterplan!
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/06/robert-glasper-covered-interview
http://noisey.vice.com/blog/robert-glasper-covered-interview-premiere

dude worked with bilal on first born second as a for instance!

Looking forward, do you think you're going to release a straight-ahead originals jazz album?
Not at the moment. I'm not in that place at the moment. I'm not in that particular place because I did that for years. I did that for ten years, play straight ahead jazz tunes my way. I like where I’m at doing these kinds of songs. I feel like I'm bridging the gap. 'Cause there's just no reference. Getting a 20 year-old to like jazz, it's hard— it's damn near impossible. I think about it all the time. It's like trying to convince your grandmother to listen to Lil Wayne and like it. Literally the same thing. I just like to switch it around 'cause it makes people really believe. Think about it! Because your grandmother has no reference of Lil Wayne. She comes from a whole other era! She doesn’t know what's happening! When she hears that she’s like “What!?” but we’ll be like “Oh, we get it.” So it's the same thing. Parents will be like “We get it.” But the 20 year-olds, they don’t get that. They don’t grow up in an era with original jazz music.

If I may jump in, the Miles album is a curious one in that it's neither a straightforward remix album, or a jazz record that improvises on the original themes. Not that there's anything wrong in theory with that hybrid - indeed, blending sample/remix culture with live jazz is one of Glasper's specialities as others have pointed out. But it's true that it's not particularly adventurous and a lot of the tracks sound like pleasant backpacker/Soulquarian cuts. The Bilal track is nice, but is nowhere as freaky as Bilal's recent stuff, which seems a bit of a missed opportunity. The best track is the KING one, which sounds more like KING than Miles or Glasper, with its swirling synths and vocals.

I agree there's a certain tastefulness to all this stuff, and I agree that it would be exciting to see jazzers engaging with more contemporary hip-hop sonics, but I think that'll come, especially in the current spirit of exchange. In the meantime, the new Jeff Parker record on International Anthem is really cool and plays some clever games in blurring the boundaries between live and sampled elements - so there are samples, but there's also bits where the musicians deliberately play like samples/loops. Has a nice uncanny effect, while still being an accessible, grooving fusion. If you dug the Maya McCraven record then this is a must hear.

"Get Dressed" is on that new Parker album? I like.

I just find his playing really boring. I much prefer Vijay Iyer as a contemporary jazz pianist.

Digging Covered so far

Covered is doing more for me than the Miles album, though I like some tracks on that one too

'Fuck Yo Feelings' from last year is sounding really good rn.

For all the jazz that's essentially beat-based, RG's group is the best at committing to a loop and digging into the tiny details, rather than just blowing over it.

Sax player Casey Benjamin from Robert Glasper’s band dead at 45. Had recently had surgery but no other details

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/casey-benjamin-dead-saxophone_n_660aabd9e4b0c4621eb7c1fe

I saw that all over socials last night, way too young, ugh.