Robert Glasper Carries Black Music Into A Post-Hip-Hop World

“B

lack music is a big house with a lot of rooms,” says pianist, composer, and producer Robert Glasper.

A musical unicorn who has crystallized multiple genres into his own distinct brand, Glasper’s genius lays not only in his technical ability and musical acumen, but his willingness to embrace crossover as a necessary – and not unprecedented – aspect of Black music’s evolution and survival. While he prefers the term “musician” to “jazz musician,” he is profoundly aware of jazz’s role as canon, foundation, and inspiration for today’s musical movements — notably hip-hop.

Whether it’s Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach on 1960’s “Freedom Dance” foreshadowing Public Enemy’s sociopolitical creed, or jazz samples and breakbeats becoming part of hip-hop’s DNA, “jazz and hip-hop belong together,” Glasper says. “Jazz and hip-hop were born out of necessity. They both were born out of the struggle.”

Case in point: “In Tune,” from Glasper’s latest album Black Radio III. Amir Suleiman’s impassioned spoken-words are elegy, tribute, mourning, and resilience, a callback to the field hollers of pre-emancipation Afro-America. And, by extension, the radical truth of the Last Poets, the Black Arts Movement-identified “godfathers of rap” who developed a poetic style called “spoagraphics” to describe their visual imagery. Instead of conga drums, the heartbeat is Glasper’s piano; past the halfway mark, the song fills out with wafting horns and snare drum hits, becoming transformative and therapeutic.

It’s not a hip-hop track per se — there are no 808 beats, no machete-like scratches, no call-and-response chants. But “In Tune” is everything hip-hop ever aspired to be artistically: a marriage of traditional folkloric culture and contemporary relevance.

As the artist-in-residence and co-curator of the annual Blue Note Jazz Festival in Napa, running July 28–30, Glasper has assembled a lineup based on this philosophy of pastiche, bridging the worlds of hip-hop and jazz. Headliners include the “queen of hip-hop soul” Mary J. Blige, Queensbridge emcee Nas, and Chicago’s Chance the Rapper. Glasper plays live sets each of the three days, with special guests De La Soul, Lalah Hathaway, Terrace Martin and Bilal. The undercard is further saturated with the likes of Rakim and DJ Jazzy Jeff, Talib Kweli and Madlib, Digable Planets, Cordae, and host Dave Chappele.

In 2023 – a year deemed hip-hop’s 50th anniversary – Glasper knows the culture has become impossible to ignore. “Hip-hop is in itself so huge. It’s like the most global music in the world; every country has hip-hop. It’s been the leading thing in culture – not just in music, but in fashion, in sports. And it’s just so many things, and influenced so many people.”

In a live setting, Glasper says, “some hip hop artists are like having another horn in a jazz band. They’re really able to be in the moment and be able to really empathize with you, but using words, and go wherever you want to go. And that’s an art. That’s a true art.”

Rapping skillfully over live music and maintaining the flow of the groove is where the artistry shines, he says. “A lot of cats freestyle, (but) they’re just freestyling to a beat that’s just there, or no beat at all. You’re not freestyling to a band that could change at any moment and go different places and add elements in and out of all these different things.”

Glasper points out that seminal hip-hop songs by De La Soul (“Stakes Is High”) and Nas (“The World Is Yours”) both sampled jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal. Chance The Rapper and Cordae are also heavily jazz-influenced, he adds. And not only has Madlib repurposed hundreds if not thousands of jazz records as sample loops, but DJ Jazzy Jeff’s pioneering turntablist track “A Touch of Jazz” includes elements of Marvin Gaye’s “T Plays It Cool,” Bob James’ “Westchester Lady,” and Donald Byrd’s “Change (Makes You Want to Hustle),” alongside booming drums and expressive scratch cuts.

The Napa festival further accentuates the evolution of jazz culture in the Bay Area, whose history includes a San Francisco residency by New Orleans legend King Oliver in 1921, and excursions into Healdsburg by the San Francisco-based So Different jazz band during the 1920s – a time when jazz embodied the cultural leading edge of social integration efforts. Holding a major Black cultural festival in the heart of California’s wine country represents another giant step, so to speak, towards social equity.

“That’s literally what (the Blue Note Jazz Festival) is, the history of jazz, mixing it with all styles of music, and mixing the styles that jazz has influenced. And the big part of this year is 50 years of hip-hop.”

Steeped in Black music’s evolution

Glasper’s history in some ways reflects the history of jazz itself. His musical education began as a young child in Texas, where his mother, a blues and jazz singer and musical director for a Baptist church, brought him along to club dates. His first public performances were in the Black church, where he became steeped in gospel and began to develop his own style of playing. A musical prodigy, he performed with a university jazz band while still in high school.

An early flashpoint was seeing Roy Hargrove freely mix jazz with contemporary genres. When he first saw the trumpeter play live, “I was in high school,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, you could be young, Black, wear sneakers and look like that — and play jazz?’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, you can play jazz and you could play with D’Angelo? And you can play with Common?’ I saw that in real time in real life. That inspired me.”

As a student of the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York during the late ’90s, he met singer Bilal – who would become a regular collaborator – and became enmeshed the East Coast’s burgeoning neo-soul and hip-hop scenes, which frequently intersected through now-legendary production teams like the Ummah and the Soulquarians.

“In college, that’s what was happening around ’97, the neo-soul movement and specifically J. Dilla-infused R&B. So I was really in that scene a lot, working with Bilal, opening up for Erykah Badu and Common, and seeing people like James Poyser, who is one of the big influences on my playing.”

Glasper waxes poetically over producers like J. Dilla and Q-Tip, who brought a jazz sensibility to hip-hop tracks like A Tribe Called Quest’s “Lyrics to Go” and Busta Rhymes’ “Still Shining.” “They’re both jazz lovers. Coming from the jazz world, I immediately heard the jazz nuances they would put in their music, in their beats.”

Glasper considers himself fortunate to have witnessed Dilla and Q-Tip’s creative process in intimate settings. “I used to go over Tip’s house and replay samples when I was in college all the time.” His first gigs playing hip-hop were with the Roots, who worked frequently with Dilla at the time. “Literally, the Roots and Dilla pretty much raised me.”

From the Philadelphia hip-hop collective, “I learned how to stay in a pocket, and understand how to play (piano) like a sample, by playing with Questlove.” Sometimes, Dilla would be present during these woodshedding sessions. “Me being able to sit across the room with Dilla, him on the MPC, I’m on the keys — I literally learned from the greatest how to do that.”

In 2004, he released Mood, his first album as a bandleader, a fairly traditional jazz trio album of standards and original compositions. The following year, he began his long association with Blue Note Records with the trio album Canvas. His music began to veer toward fusion with 2007’s In My Element, which included a cover of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.” A 2009 offering, Double Booked, balanced acoustic trio material with his electric band, The Robert Glasper Experiment, including a track with emcee Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def).

Then came his 2012 breakthrough Black Radio, which featured guests Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, Lalah Hathaway, Erykah Badu and Yasiin Bey. Highlights included a Badu-ized version of the jazz standard “Afro Blue” and a decidedly non-grunge take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The album established Glasper as a commercially successful, forward-thinking artist who could lead jazz music in new directions, engage non-traditional jazz audiences, and do it all in a way that wasn’t cringeworthy.

“Here’s the thing, though. Rock is Black music. Hello!,” Glasper proclaims. “A lot of people still to this day don’t understand that (“Teen Spirit”), that’s a song that I’ve always loved. But I also know the roots of that song came from us. That was my reasoning for that and kind of doing it in a more urban way. So then, it speaks to more Black folk that way also.”

The tradition of jazz, he says, is rife with artists who expanded the genre by refusing to be pigeonholed, from John Coltrane interpreting “My Favorite Things” and Carmen McRae reimagining The Beatles to Donald Byrd, Herbie Hancock, Roy Ayers and Ramsey Lewis mixing jazz, funk, and R&B. To him, it’s all Black music, which he sees as “a lot of clay” that can be shaped and reformed infinitely. Ultimately, he says, “it all comes from Africa.”

Awards, Tours, and the Festival

Glasper’s stratospheric ascension in recent years has included releasing two more volumes of Black Radio, along with more straightforward jazz projects, scoring films and documentaries, and collaborating with a host of hip-hop and soul artists – Kendrick Lamar, Mac Miller, Anderson .Paak, Maxwell, Big K.R.I.T., Q-Tip, Talib Kweli, Denzel Curry, Jill Scott, Snoop Dogg, and Common, to name a few.

Along the way, he’s collected all kinds of accolades, including an Emmy and five Grammys, and served as the artist-in-residence at the Blue Note Jazz Festival even before its original New York edition expanded to Napa in 2022.

Through it all, he says he feels a sense of responsibility for maintaining jazz’s relevance in a post-hip-hop landscape, where technology has become a cultural driver and true musicianship is undervalued. Music isn’t a program in many schools anymore, he notes, and most music is made on a computer or iPhone.

“I feel like I’m a torchbearer, and I’ve got to survive and teach as much as I can and not feel like I’m teaching and not sound like I’m teaching,” he says. “There’s a certain way you got to do it. You just got to do stuff that speaks to people.”

The Blue Note Jazz Festival runs July 28–30 at Silverado Resort in Napa. Details here.