Robert Glasper

[AllenLowe]

I've been more intrigued by the possibilities of hip hop than the reality - and I have heard some local guys who have done what amounts to some fascinating orchestration of combined samples - and John Szwed has probably written the most interesting things I have seen on hip hop's connection to the oral tradition. But I think it has hit a creative wall of repetition and mass audience, there's so much money there now that that's all anybody can see. I will say, most cynically, that it's been great for academics, who think that socially it's a sign of great ferment and a perfect subject for the sociological bandwagon. But there's less than meets the eye and ear, IMHO.

Edited April 2, 2012 by AllenLowe

[.:.impossible]

Stones Throw Records

Warp Records

Two labels that don't give a shit what you guys feel about Robert Glasper or a hip-hop/jazz hybrid. Not to mention the hundreds of mixtapes that flow throw the Internet every week. You guys can analyze the music all you want, and imagine this ideal that you can't quite actually imagine, but people are going on about their music whether or not it is jazz enough for you. Surprised as you may be, the term hip-hop probably means as much as the term jazz at this point.

I think Chuck has put it as succinctly as anyone here is going to be able to put it. You are not the audience and it didn't happen. Not the way you wanted it to. Never will.

[.:.impossible]

Allen, what specifically are you talking about? No disrespect intended.

Creative wall, repetition, mass audience, money, etc. Seems like a characature of a stereotype.

Hip-hop seems to me to be a water that is as deep as you are willing to dive. Not quite the same way jazz is, since this is a conversation about hip-hop and jazz, but hip-hop is a prolific culture. Almost none of it will ever be heard by any branch of popular culture.

[JSngry]

Stones Throw Records

Warp Records

Two labels that don't give a shit what you guys feel about Robert Glasper or a hip-hop/jazz hybrid. Not to mention the hundreds of mixtapes that flow throw the Internet every week. You guys can analyze the music all you want, and imagine this ideal that you can't quite actually imagine, but people are going on about their music whether or not it is jazz enough for you. Surprised as you may be, the term hip-hop probably means as much as the term jazz at this point.

I think Chuck has put it as succinctly as anyone here is going to be able to put it. You are not the audience and it didn't happen. Not the way you wanted it to. Never will.

Just got Georgia Anne Muldrow's new album, put it on to drive to a gig this evening, and this one comes on, and I'm thinking all of a sudden, you know, that whole Robert Gasper thing might be nice, but it's not really...relevant, not with stuff like this going on...I didn't cancel my order, but still...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQUFAhWnuVo&feature=relmfu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ2jza4fbJ4&feature=relmfu

[JSngry]

I'm no expert here, but why does there have to be some meaningful musical-social relationship between hip-hop and jazz (of the past, present, or future) or between jazz and hip-hop? Is it merely/essentially because (to use Peter Pullman's term) they're both af-am musics in origin? If so, there are plenty of popular and artistically significant non-af-am musics that never had much (or that much) to do with each other (e.g. the waltz, Italian opera, Rembetika, Gamelan, Ragas, etc., etc., and no one got their panties in a knot over their "failure" to have musical commerce with each other. Of course, anyone is free to try if they themselves feel within themselves a viable musical reason to do so -- I think, for one, of what the members of Air did with ragtime way back when -- but otherwise? Or are we really talking about some blend of marketing and social engineering?

Speaking for myself only, I look to hip-hop as a hope for it to be the "popular" conduit for doing to metric texture and rhythmic dimension what Coltrane & McCoy did to tertiary harmony, and all the implications thereof.

Of course, this has all already happened in the "art" world, but me, I don't like the "art" world all that much , truth be told. Everybody thinks instead of sings and writes instead of dances. What kind of a world is that to raise your kids in? And for that matter, what kind of a world is it where people only sing and dance and never think and write? Not as bad a one, but still...

Jazz had already gotten to the point where a world of Yes We Have No Bananas and all its various voluminous offsprings was no longer necessary. At all. And that was a good thing. Hip-Hop (at what I think to be its best) is doing the same thing for popular music., rearranging where all the "its" go and where all the "places" are, restoring pure rhythm as a force of the communicative intellect as well as the reflexive body,and...what the hell does "supposed to" mean anyway?

Hip-hop possesses the potential to blow this shit up, just all the way up, and in some cases it already has. But old man not of the intended audience that I am, I would like to point out that having a revolution is easy enough, changing a world in the aftermath of one, not so much. Thus the input of the Wise Elders to the Young Re-Definers With Ears To Hear....strength on strength never hurt anything.

So anyway... the desire for all this to come about? It's all about me and my desire to rid my world of as much shit and bullshit as was not put here for me or by me or to be good for me but instead is here solely to serve somebody's notion of what my notion of what I should be should be.

[robertoart]

Glad to see historical determinism is alive and well in the 21st century!

The good old English (and the French and Spanish and Dutch and Portugese) set the wheels in motion for a lot of 'historical determinism'.

[.:.impossible]

Let me just clarify that I don't consider myself the intended audience either. What I think we need to understand though is that most of this stuff is being created with no set audience in mind at this point. Hip-hop has a much wider audience reach than I imagine was intended, most likely because it became extremely wide reaching for influence and inspiration.

I fully understand that I was born into a world where hip-hop already existed and that alone creates a very different, and possibly lesser, understanding of the subject.

[Fer Urbina]

Saw Glasper at Barbican in 2010, opening for Terence Blanchard. I thought he was too laid back, almost unprepared for the gig, erratic at times. I also got the impression that he was believing the hype around him. When Blanchard and drummer Chris Dave came on stage to close his set, the difference in tension and direction in the music was quite evident.

Of course, nobody seemed to agree with me: Glasper got a standing ovation and rave reviews.

F

PS Also, I seem to remember that there were more black people in the audience than usual. Something that also happens with Wynton Marsalis, by the way.

[AllenLowe]

impossible - that's fine, I have no problem with disagreement - I just, at one time, spent a fair amount of time listening to old school, I have a drummer who is really into it, and I just jump and skim, listening, though I could not cite chapter and verse - to me it's got the same limitations as the drone-guys stuff, or 90 percent of what I see reviewed in Signal to Noise or the whole electronic movement - one idea and little else, no sense of real presence beyond a quick expression of idea which is generally not very interesting to begin with. These guys all tend to confuse a gimmick with an idea, mannerism with style. That's just my take, of course. But I think it's a function of just how easy it is to produce sound in the digital age, and it breeds a real formal laziness.

as for:

"Two labels that don't give a shit what you guys feel about Robert Glasper or a hip-hop/jazz hybrid. Not to mention the hundreds of mixtapes that flow throw the Internet every week. You guys can analyze the music all you want, and imagine this ideal that you can't quite actually imagine, but people are going on about their music whether or not it is jazz enough for you. Surprised as you may be, the term hip-hop probably means as much as the term jazz at this point. "

irrelevant, I think, for the critical disussion at hand - it's like saying, in the political form, "well the Republicans don't give a shit about what you think about them...they reproduce constantly, sorry if they are not politcally correct enough for you." It doesn't preclude us from talking about it and criticizing it.

I constantly read articles about hip hop which turn out to be much more interesting than the actual music. I'll check out those labels, however. The "writing" in hip hop tends toward doggerel; I don't find it as strong and intricate and layered as that of the blues tradition or even the old-style 19th century folk/minstrel things written by people like Alec Rogers.

Edited April 2, 2012 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

I'm just happy that there's still some respect for the Rhodes piano.

Polysyllabic WORD!

[Larry Kart]

So anyway... the desire for all this to come about? It's all about me and my desire to rid my world of as much shit and bullshit as was not put here for me or by me or to be good for me but instead is here solely to serve somebody's notion of what my notion of what I should be should be.

Your "desire for all this to come about" sounds kinda like a semi-political protest -- e.g. "my desire to rid my world of as much shit and bullshit as was not put here for me or by me or to be good for me but instead is here solely to serve somebody's notion of what my notion of what I should be should be." ( I'm reminded some, albeit in an inside-out way, of Bob Dylan's "...because something is happening here but you don't know what it is do you, Mr. Jones?") I admit that some music, or the promotion of said music, can have the effect of the sort of alien and alienating social nudging (or worse) that you dislike, but how this fits into "I look to hip-hop as a hope for it to be the 'popular' conduit for doing to metric texture and rhythmic dimension what Coltrane & McCoy did to tertiary harmony, and all the implications thereof" escapes me. Music can become a form of social nudging, but desiring/expecting music to (seemingly primarily?) fight back against social nudging (or worse)? Like that Dylan lyric, it reminds me of Woody Guthrie's "This guitar kills Fascists." No -- and new horizons in "metric texture and rhythmic dimension" don't kill them either.

[A Lark Ascending]

Glad to see historical determinism is alive and well in the 21st century!

The good old English (and the French and Spanish and Dutch and Portugese) set the wheels in motion for a lot of 'historical determinism'.

It goes much earlier than that. The inevitable arrival of the Messiah is deeply ingrained in Jewish and Christian culture and the sense of a world headed towards a predetermined end point.

Not to mention Manifest Destiny!

[.:.impossible]

Hey no disagreement Allen. Just trying to understand your perspective. It's not like saying anything other than what it said. What I'm telling you is that hip-hop is alive and well, thriving in fact, and these are two high profile labels that are keeping it in the mainstream. Neither are exclusively hip-hop labels. Sub Pop released the Shabazz Palaces record last year...

Most hip-hop is not on a label and is not for sale. It's just out there and the folks have moved on to the next one.

You know, I heard John Coltrane for the first time via Terminator X at summer camp. I was probably eleven or twelve.

I'm not as passionate about hip-hop as I am about other things. I don't even particularly enjoy rap/MCs for the most part. There are a handful that do blow my simple mind the way that Charlie Parker blows my simple mind though. MF DOOM and his various incarnations especially.

I still haven't heard the Glasper album, but a hip-hop head friend of mine gave me one of his previous albums a few years back and I didn't make it through. I'm just not impressed with him as a piano player. Soft focus vaseline lens photography. I dig the concept here though. I'll check it out on my next run.

There is a live clip of then doing Teen Spirit that another friend shared with me a couple of weeks ago that caught my ear. I liked the vocoder and sparse drumming a lot.

[Fer Urbina]

I'm just happy that there's still some respect for the Rhodes piano.

Two/three days before my disappointment with Glasper, I saw Craig Taborn exclusively on Rhodes with Chris Potter's Underground. Now, THAT was impressive.

But it's never the instrument, is it?

F

[JSngry]

So anyway... the desire for all this to come about? It's all about me and my desire to rid my world of as much shit and bullshit as was not put here for me or by me or to be good for me but instead is here solely to serve somebody's notion of what my notion of what I should be should be.

Your "desire for all this to come about" sounds kinda like a semi-political protest -- e.g. "my desire to rid my world of as much shit and bullshit as was not put here for me or by me or to be good for me but instead is here solely to serve somebody's notion of what my notion of what I should be should be." ( I'm reminded some, albeit in an inside-out way, of Bob Dylan's "...because something is happening here but you don't know what it is do you, Mr. Jones?") I admit that some music, or the promotion of said music, can have the effect of the sort of alien and alienating social nudging (or worse) that you dislike, but how this fits into "I look to hip-hop as a hope for it to be the 'popular' conduit for doing to metric texture and rhythmic dimension what Coltrane & McCoy did to tertiary harmony, and all the implications thereof" escapes me. Music can become a form of social nudging, but desiring/expecting music to (seemingly primarily?) fight back against social nudging (or worse)? Like that Dylan lyric, it reminds me of Woody Guthrie's "This guitar kills Fascists." No -- and new horizons in "metric texture and rhythmic dimension" don't kill them either.

Not looking to kill anybody.

Just seeing that there are other possibilities to/in popular music that fit "me" better than most of what 20th Century America has come up with (much as I've been touched by all that, it's mostly been a touch from without, not from within), possibilities of things like "place", "space", "size", timbre and rhythm as carriers of intellectual information entirely in and of themselves, de-necessitation of music as an at all costs "linear narrative" (hell, cut to the chase, condense it down, and repeat the hell out of it. If it's a good enough idea, that's grounds for meditation, music as mantra).

I began to hear it in 70s Miles, then a few years later when discovering Fela...Whoa! Here's some ways of doing things that reach my mind and body a lot more directly than la--al-la AND they stir up thoughts and feelings beyond the initial. Much like....Ornette, Cecil or Trane or Ayler, or Roscoe or any other number of "jazz" musics that dealt with mulitple planes existing simultaneously & explicitly, information coming in all directions and "movements" of reaction being felt in long-lasting ripple effects.

The hip-hop that I like is doing that same thing, just with a "popular" vernacular and technology. I'm a fan, and I offer my encouragement, because dammit, yes I DO have some goddamn bananas, and not just today, so I really don't find the joke funny any more, if I ever really did in the first place.

So, I'm not about music nudging the social. No no no no NO. I'm about hoping that the social nudges the music, because then we'll have a music more reflective of a more-than-three-dimensional reality (which, after all, is the truth, ask any psychicsist or mystic). In other words, we'll have a more realistic music, at least, more realistic about what we now know. What we had was delightlful for what we used to know. But that was then, this is now, and although the fundamentals still/always apply, the modes/means of expression don't.

A party that creates itself is always more fun than one that is presented.

I mean, c'mon, living in a three-dimensional world is like being a character in your own book. You live life on the page, not in reality. People are figuring this out, and music is reflecting that, sometimes in failed gasps and spurts, sometimes in reach-exceeding-grasp visions, and occasionally, BAM getting there. If we're experiencing the first waves of a true paradigm shift (and I think we are), then we have to look at the notion that evolution doesn't occur linearly, nor are all changes rooted in sustainable (or even sound) principles. But on the whole, things that work take hold and grow and mutate and grow some more, and the next thing you know, there you are, a year or a few thousand or million later.

Sam didn't make the pants too long. He didn't make them long enough.

Edited April 2, 2012 by JSngry

[Noj]

I have the Glasper disc, but I haven't listened to it yet. I see that Erykah Badu has done a version of "Afro Blue," and my first thought is, "she's got her work cut out for her with all the great versions of that one." Listening now...

For me, hip hop makes perfect sense in the history of American music. It's as relevant as any genre. A person who has liked any of the hits can explore it for more. No one is forced to.

Even the rotten club rap stuff with the raunchy monotone lyrics makes perfect sense to me. That's all about the demands of certain dance floors and what it takes to move a certain crowd.

I don't hear anything groundbreaking on this Glasper thing, but I like it. It's mellow and melodic, with funky drums and sounds and enjoyable vocals. My kind of stuff. The other branch of rap, intended for chilling out and listening.

[.:.impossible]

I just had a chance to listen to the first half hour or so. What's not to like? It sounds to me like a very well-produced r&b album. I'll buy this.

Where is this "way ahead" stuff coming from? Are y'all trying to create an argument that this is not the way ahead for jazz? This isn't even a jazz record!

Perhaps the way ahead for r&b? I don't hear anything groundbreaking here. Just a continuation of what has been for the past three decades. I definitely don't hear it as a "dead end".

Am I the one that is confused here?

[Clunky]

This isn't even a jazz record!

Perhaps the way ahead for r&b? I don't hear anything groundbreaking here. Just a continuation of what has been for the past three decades. I definitely don't hear it as a "dead end".

Am I the one that is confused here?

It is being sold as a jazz record though.

[JSngry]

I'm waiting for something like a Randy Travis/Madlib joint that everybody digs and nobody bats an eye at, so if anybody's confused, it's probably me.

[.:.impossible]

Well there's no Randy Travis here Jim, but I think you'll like this.

[JSngry]

I like the idea of "personal identities" being so strong and distinct that they can seamlessly merge with other equally strong ones so much that I must be horribly confused. Must be.

But you can't force it. That would be Stan Kenton (who I continue to develop new appreciation for, so don't take that as a slam. I'm just sayin'...). I'm liking the notion of The World As Ellington Orchestra, where Paul Gonsalves & Russell Procope can play in the same section, and have virtually everything in common precisely because they have virtually nothing in common. That kind of thing.

Ah, but who - or what - would be the Ellington? Again, you can't force it, so...it'll have to come about voluntarily.

But that's why when it seems that somebody is honestly moving in that direction, hey, I'll spend my money at least once, just to Keep Hope Alive and To Let The Fools Know.

In the meantime...there's the meantime.

[JSngry]

Been alternating this and Nicholas Payton's Bitches for the last two days, and the Glasper disc is perfectly good, and perfectly not ground-breaking. This kind of thing has been going on for a while now (and internationally, too. I could name names from around the globe that have been tilling this soil in preparation for the sowing that is sure to come). What makes Glasper's record a little different is the overt "jazz sensibility" found on most of the cuts, and that's a huge difference.

Most of the other people working in this vein have had to "force" the jazz, the harmonies, the solos, the "hang" of the time. Not Glasper & Co. They are jazz, it is what they do, and it is what they bring to the table here. Doesn't make them "innovative", far from it, but it does make them different (enough), and is really a continuation of the premise of jazz musicians making the "best" R&B records, a premise that is older than most members of this board.

Comparison to the Payton record is instructive. Payton has better songs (or at least more unconventional ones) and his is actually the more "adventurous" music. But Glasper's is by far and away the better recorded and produced. This shit matters, the same way that proper section playing matters in an orchestra - the object is to present as maximally a total sonic experience as can be had, and in a recording-specific musical concept, the casual/haphazard/inexperienced approach does not serve that object. People talk about how Miles didn't really "understand" how to make "those kind of records" that he made with Marcus Miller, but what Miles did understand was that he might not understand, but that somebody needed to understand, or else the results would not be worthy of his name. So he let himself be led by those who knew how to get there, and the destination was reached. Mission accomplished.

All this to just say that Robert Glasper seems to know how to get there on his own, and that Nicholas Payton needs to find his Marcus Miller. But both have made good records that move the game ahead to varying degrees, so good for them, and let's see what else we can do with it now.

And oh yeah, I heard that opening "Hello World" on the Glasper album and started to get pissed. Glasper was hard ripping off the inimitable Shafiq Husayn, I mean, big-time. So I looked at the notes, and...oooops, it actually WAS Shafiq Husayn! My bad!

Excellent choice, that was, and not at all bad company to be keeping, if company is in fact being kept.

[JETman]

This discussion seems just a bit "too little, too late" to me. A guy like Kenny Garrett (who has a lot more going on than either of these guys, IMHO), gets ripped a new "jazzhole" everytime he releases a new cd because it is deemed more lighthearted and accessible than the average jazzhead would like to hear. It's a shame, really, because at one time he was good enough for Miles. I've seen him twice (once with Metheny and once with Pharoah), and he more than demonstrated skills out the wazoo.

His new one, "Seeds From the Underground", is definitely a keeper, btw. But as usual, YMMV.

[JSngry]

This Kenny Garret record "covered all bases" as well as they could be covered...and got no hype whatsoever...

I still hope for some version of Blue Note to sign Kenny Garrett and let him make a "Kenny Garrett Record" instead of a "New York Jazz" record or a "Marketplace Friendly" record.

[JETman]

But Glasper and Payton made "NY Jazz" and "Marketplace" records, and you don't seem to have a prob with either of those!!!

And, wtf exactly is a NY jazz record? Why u b hatin'??? I know that jazz did not originate here, but without here, there b nowhere for all those talented cats to run to! Hear?