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Robert Glasper, the alchemist

The Grammy-winning jazz pianist breaks boundaries

A quarter century has passed since the death of Miles Davis. Though he was a master of the trumpet, Davis’ ability to fearlessly transcend genres and trends left the deepest imprint on the shape of modern music. For his 2015 biopic on Davis’ life, Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle trusted pianist Robert Glasper to craft a soundtrack that best embodied his inimitable style. Glasper’s penchant for innovating outside of the jazz tradition makes him an obvious successor to Davis, though not always in sound, but in spirit. “I feel like people try to keep jazz sounding a certain way and they can’t put their influences in because it wouldn’t be jazz,” Glasper says. “Whatever your music is let it be who you are now because that’s what all of our heroes did.”

Glasper’s style is defined by the unfettered exploration of his influences and the way they fuse with the workings of his own musical mind.

On albums such as 2012’s Grammy-winning Black Radio, the Houston-born musician and producer operates like a mad alchemist, mixing hip-hop, R&B, and soul into a potent elixir.

Along with saxophonist Kamasi Washington and bassist Thundercat, Glasper also played in the all-star rhythm section that helped transform Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly into a modern classic. In recognition of his place in the rap canon, the A3C Hip-Hop Festival & Conference brings Glasper in this year as a featured speaker, highlighting the lineage between jazz and hip-hop.


Glasper’s latest release, ArtScience, oscillates between DayGlo ’80s funk and breakneck jazz fusion, zipping through time with tremendous dexterity. He traces his crossover aesthetic back to growing up in Houston’s diverse music scene. “I actually started to blend styles when I was in church in high school with my friends drummer Kendrick Scott and bassist Mark Kelley,” he says. “We would come from church and mix jazz tunes and church tunes and since then that’s what I’ve always done and that’s always been my style.”

After cutting his teeth in Houston, Glasper attended the prestigious New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City where he first met soul singer Bilal Oliver. The two quickly paired up, performing gigs around NYC and making inroads into the burgeoning neo soul movement of the ’90s. It was around this time when Glasper started collaborating with musicians such as Erykah Badu, J Dilla, and Kanye West who would cement his influence in the fusion of soul and hip-hop.

Glasper’s resume is ridiculously impressive, including credits on West’s Late Registration, Q-Tip’s The Renaissance, Meshell Ndegeocello’s The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams, and more. Rather than creating a forced legacy between hip-hop and jazz, Glasper insists the union is organic. “My purpose was never to say, ‘Hey I gotta get with times and put hip-hop in my music,’ because there are more ways to be relevant,” he says. “My way to be relevant is hip-hop and R&B because I’m urban and black and that’s what I grew up listening to so that’s my life and that’s what makes my shit real.”

His work in those genres imbues his playing with a distinctive quality where glimmers of other styles flow into his keystrokes. Of all his collaborations, Glasper points to the late producer J Dilla as the musician who impacted his playing the most. Dilla was famous for layering beats without quantization. In other words, his drums played around on the front and back ends of the beats rather than being in lock step with the tempo. The end result is a loose, staggered feel that Glasper integrates into his rhythms.

“Half of how I play is from J Dilla,” he says. “He’s the only producer I know that where musicians try to play like him whereas most producers are mimicking musicians. He’s the sole reason there was a neo soul movement.”

Glasper continues to play an integral role in hip-hop, even when it’s only through accompaniment. “Hip-hop was born out of jazz and other music,” Glasper says. “I’m one of the only ones that straddles jazz and hip-hop records so I can speak to a bigger piece of the pie than other cats.”

Most jazz historians tend to gloss over the fact that Davis’ last album, Doo-Bop, was a bona fide hip-hop record. With his forward-thinking embrace of disparate genres, Glasper picks up Davis’ torch, creating new pathways for musicians to innovate free of boundaries. “Innovating is about using your surroundings,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be hip-hop and R&B, just tell your story.”

Robert Glasper speaks at A3C’s Pro-Audio Center (SAE Institute) on Fri., Oct 8. 3:45 p.m.