KING

Actually it sounds like a weird blend of things (overdubbing on/sampling Miles recordings?), so who knows:

Everything’s Beautiful brings Miles Davis’ sound into the 21st century, blending a diverse group of master takes and outtakes from across Miles’ incredible tenure with Columbia Records (1955-1985) with original reinterpretations. Robert Glasper produced the collaboration.

But there have been enough jazz albums that pay tribute to (or recreate the style of) almost every phase of his career, so y'know, whatever they want to do.

Glasper's Black Radio albums are spectacular; dude is a genius so I'm totally happy to see his remix culture take on miles

reminds me of this project (which had its moments, actually): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthalassa:_The_Music_of_Miles_Davis_1969%E2%80%931974

why is glasper a genius

Well, musically he's a demon both as a composer and a performer; probably seen him play a dozen shows live and he has never been anything less than enthralling.

As a cultural figure, in the direct face of the wyntonesque old guard, he has long argued in principle and action that the way forward for jazz as a popular art form is to embrace contemporary hip hop and r&b. He has been doing that from the aughties when peeps dismissed that as corny hip bop revivalism but hey lo and behold it begets thundercat and kendrick and many of the the boldest and most meaningful voices in both jazz and hip hop. He has been a force for musicianship in rap and vitality in jazz and theres a limited number of people doing that.

lo where behold what beget how

http://weigelbroadcasting.com/assets/contest/206/contestimage/980x420_TooHotToHandel.png

glasper plays some good piano on a bilal album i like

"lo where behold what beget how"

glasper's recording career is over ten years old, i'm saying he's been around long enough to change the conversation. he's extremely influential and impactful on the creative careers of any number of contemporary musicians who came up hearing him and are now working with him.
he's a guy who was raised on the native tongues and has a tribute to dilla as one of his standards. the vast majority of serious jazz artists of the early 00's didn't much fuck with hip hop (except in extremely corny ways), glasper is a successful, thoughtful composer who does
http://bricartsmedia.org/events/robert-glasper-experiment-featuring-talib-kweli-glenn-kotche-aja-monet
^this show pulled around 10k people; there were massive crowds outside the gates. this kind of crossover jazz revivalism is a significant musical movement, both in terms of audience interest and creative output, and glasper's on the vanguard

I don't disagree with any of that forks, I just wish I was more into the records he's making. Like, the band is playing songs with all these guest vocalists and the playing is weirdly safe, but the songs are just not that great. And when Glasper/Derrick Hodge/Chris Dave show up in the context of someone else's record where there is a stronger concept happening (thinking Maxwell, D'Angelo, Jose James, Kendrick, etc), there's a lot more 'going for it'.

why is glasper a genius

some of that's matter of taste i guess? imo both black radio albums were among the best music released in their given year (sure they are occasionally corny but idgaf).

But i hear what you're saying about how he and the trio are pretty straight ahead with their playing on their own albums (though maybe try a few tracks on the new album, Covered; his take on Stella by Starlight is dope and shows great versatility). he values beauty in his playing and i think that sometimes gets confused with weakness; just because he has a fondness for lengthy polished legato sections doesn't make what he's doing any less daring. also i will cop to being colored by seeing his live performances which are multi-media jam sessions and often inspire more experimentation.

it may be fair to say that glasper is most effective culturally when he's part of the mix but it's too easy to overlook that he's the straw that stirs the drink.

Didn't know about Covered, definitely enjoying this more than Black Radio. I wish Chris Dave was on it though, they're such good foils for each other. Glasper will play something pretty and CD will fill in the space with something so unexpected and rhythmically digusting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xObvb77GzQE

maybe we should move this to the Glasper or the jazz thread though.

yeah, that video is entirely in line with what i think of when i think of glasper. great stuff.
if you wanna stay on thread topic, i think there's def intersectionality with Glasper and KINGs sound and maybe a good piece to be written about how they're both children of 80's R&B and jazz fusion. riyl for sure

So good in London last night. Incredible atmosphere and Native Land for the encore.

Agreed, best gig I've been to so far this year.

excellent, stoked about seeing them tmw

i couldn't go :(

Free show in NYC in Central Park on Saturday, June 11 at 2:00pm with Cymande and Deva Mahal; apologies for reposting this on a zillion threads but I'm excited.
http://www.cityparksfoundation.org/event/summerstage-cymande-king-deva-mahal-dj-parler/

with CYMANDE?!!???

right?

whoa

they seemed to be having a lot of fun when I saw them who could ever begrudge

Finally bought this. So great.

http://saintheron.com/featured/interview-king-discuss-creating-their-own-musical-destiny-in-the-realm-of-rb/

Mixing soul with traditional R&B gives accolades to the selection of music that has been influential across all genres.

this appears to have been written by the same guy who writes the subject headers for the spam in my inbox.

Realize the grand importance of creative expression, as KING shows and proves that their art speaks for itself and while not against the artist but develops with them as artists.

yeah, i'm not sure this is english.

i just remembered what the bridge of "the right one' reminds me of! it's "mountains"!

or rather it's like if "mountains" melted

which "mountains"?

prince

vinyl

Damn, means I'll have bought it twice. Ah well.

why on earth would you buy the vinyl when you already own the CD?

give the $20 to the local animal shelter instead.

i don't own the CD.

ah missed chewsh's post

i'll answer tho: cause it's an awesome object? on gold vinyl? some people really like playing records? etc.

http://f.cl.ly/items/2h2v0k3f0H2H2j2V180c/ClouDrop%2023%20Jun%202016,%2009%3A29%3A57%2023%20Jun%202016,%2009%3A33%3A13.png

I bought the digital download.

I also DJ, and prefer to use vinyl.

Strange comment though, why are you bringing up animal shelters?

Why would you buy a CD, when the digital download is more convenient anyway? Why didn't you give that etc.

sorry, i'm ignorant on this topic but is there some technical reason they had to do this as double vinyl? if not, i wish they'd done a single LP.

i'm guessing it's at 45rpm, for sound quality

(at 45rpm you can only fit a couple of songs on each side)

Most double's are still 33 1/3. But with less tracks you make the grooves wider which allows for a bigger dynamic range.

Single LPs are gash for DJing too.

Isn't the album almost an hour long? So it wouldn't fit on a regular single LP, even if they made grooves narrower and sacrificed the bass.

I don't think it's necessarily intentional, but they way this album has been marketed has been kinda dodgy. When first became available, it was only as a digital pre-order on Bandcamp with no mention of any physical release. So I paid for the pre-order, so I could listen to the couple of preview tracks you got with that. Then, later on, they did add a limited edition CD to Bandcamp, but at that point presumably a lot of people had already paid for the digital pre-order, so if they wanted to pay for the CD, they had to pay twice. Anyway, that limited edition sold out very soon, and there was still no info whether there'd be a regular, non-limited physical release.

Then, long after the digital album was officially released, a regular CD came out, but it was not available on Bandcamp at all. (Normally, when a band releases an album on Bandcamp that also has a physical version, you only have to pay for it once: you get the digital release immediately, and the CD/LP/cassette will arrive in mail later on.) I like physical records, so I paid for the album for the second time. And now there's an LP version coming out... Thankfully I'm not a vinyl fetishist so I won't need it, but presumably there are some folks who have now paid for the album thrice: first for the digital version (because there was no info whether there would be a physical release), then for the CD (because there was no info whether it would ever come out on vinyl), and then for the LP.

It's self-released, right? They might have used the digital money to pay for the CD, then CD money to pay for pressing the vinyl. Just guessing.

I guess that could be the case, but that's not how most self-released CDs are done on Bandcamp. You can pre-order the album, the band gets the money right away, and the CD will arrive to you later on. Of course it's a bit of a financial risk to promise there will a CD release, since you don't know whether it'll sell enough copies to cover the pressing costs, but the other alternative would be to make your fans pay for the album twice, which is kinda shitty too. There wasn't a huge gap between the announcement of the digital album and the CD version, so the band must've known a CD was coming, yet they made the digital version available to buy with no mention that there'll be a physical release.

I don't see that anyone's being 'made' to do anything...

Dude it's dickish, come on.

first world problems

I've been holding out for a vinyl release as it's my preferred format these days but it's almost $40 including shipping and I can't really justify spending that much more than the cost of the CD. If there was going to be a version on regular vinyl that I could buy in shops for $20, I'd wait for that. At this stage I just want to own my favourite album of the year on some kind of physical format.