Glasper’s original sidemen, Archer and Reid, hold up nicely, and given Glasper’s more recent brilliant work with bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer Mark Colenburg following the original trio’s mid-2000s run, that’s no small feat. A homage to the life of artist/activist Harry Belafonte on his own testifying “Got Over,” together with the Lamar cover, also feels timely and necessary as a bit of intergenerational discourse in an age of Black Lives Matter and the emerging New Civil Rights Movement. His passion and politics converge sweetly and devastatingly on his riff of Kendrick Lamar’s “I’m Dying of Thirst,” where children speak the names of black people murdered at the hands of the state over a more casual, yet somberly present Glasper. On an elegant and emotionally tense ride like Bilal’s “Levels” or the intricate and smoldering vision of Aiko’s “The Worst,” one can hear Glasper’s mastery at work and how he broke through as someone to hear when so very many other young jazz musicians have not. Bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Damion Reid all bring quality and polish to the project, but it’s Glasper’s keys that get the spotlight treatment we’ve been recently missing. We get to hear him regularly enough as a sideman on projects by such artists as Bilal, Kendrick Lamar, and Taylor McFerrin, so we need not hear him play that role on his own projects, as it sometimes felt with Black Radio. The project is done simply with piano, percussion, and bass, so Glasper stands out in ways that he laid back on the Black Radio projects, and it’s nice to experience a front and center Glasper again. Recorded Live at Capitol Studios with an audience, where many of the American music greats made some of their most seminal pop and jazz albums, with the new disc Covered Robert Glasper and his band of merry men may have just made one of their own. In his presentation, there needn’t be a separation of the past and present, no requirement that a jazz musician choose one over the other and still be taken seriously as a purist. Hits by artists like Musiq and Jhene Aiko sit rather comfortably with jazz standards like “Stella By Starlight” in Glasper’s capable hands.
As an album heavy with jazz takes of contemporary R&B cover tunes, it doesn’t completely abdicate the modern or the radio ready, but it nicely bridges the two worlds of Glasper and brings his audiences together for this project.
1 and 2 projects made him better known among the mainstream. The project returns Glasper to the kind of music that made his name in the jazz circles, before the Grammy-winning Black Radio Vol.
It is the most soothing and, at times, feels the most personal of Robert Glasper’s recent output. I’m Dying Of Thirst (Kendrick Lamar Cover) Stella By Starlight (Victor Young Cover)ġ2. Genre: Progressive Jazz / Contemporary JazzĠ2.
0 kommentar(er)
