Jazz Today (Rachel Cantrell)

I was sitting in Ravi Coltrane’s saxophone clinic at the Reno Jazz Festival when I was reminded of Jon Wertheim and the piece he’d asked me to do ages ago. Perhaps it was lack of concentration or a lack of inspiration, but I’d already spent more than a few nights blinking at the blank page on my computer screen, slightly panicked at the thought that I had no idea where to start. But watching Coltrane holding a microphone in one hand and steadying a saxophone in the other – a stark contrast to the Coltrane I’d seen a few months ago – definitely sparked something.

I’d already heard Coltrane play once before with Ralph Alessi at the Angel City Jazz Festival here in Los Angeles – despite the fact that he was closing a five-hour show for what was, by then, an overwhelmed and sleepy-eyed audience, he somehow managed to wake me up. It wasn’t the volume – the festival did revolve around a sort of “new-age,” pushing-the-limits kind of music, and volume didn’t seem to be that much of a rarity. Coltrane just seemed to possess some kind of uncanny ability to be “out” without being too “out,” finding a balance between the “What the hell is going on?” and the “This totally sounds familiar” that brought me back to ground by the end of the concert. I walked into that Reno concert hall knowing that I liked Coltrane based on the brief set he played in Los Angeles, and I expected to hear something that I liked. And, for the most part, I did.

However, I can’t say the same for the rest of my jazz band, let alone the rest of the audience. There were several hundred jazz students and band directors packed into that concert hall – some genuinely excited to hear Ravi, some dragged along by their directors, and some thinking that they were actually going to hear John Coltrane himself. (Hooray for high school.) When Ravi began playing, he had the attention of the majority of the audience – but once he began speaking, the iPhones were flipped out and the sleeping began, some groups even leaving the theater mid-lecture.

We’re a tough crowd. No matter how talented or well-known an artist is, there’s something that she/he needs when it comes to reaching out to younger listeners: relatability. For the younger crowd, there’s a certain degree of importance in the allure of the first few seconds of an artist’s piece – which, unfortunately, is a bit difficult with artists like Ravi Coltrane, whose albums take a few listens through to actually soak in.

That’s why the artist I’ve chosen here as the most representative of contemporary jazz is Robert Glasper. In the terms of musical relatability, he takes the traditional concepts of jazz and fuses them with more contemporary musical ideas – hip-hop, R&B. He’s worked and played with names that both my non-jazz-listener classmates and I know: Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and others. Glasper’s music contains influences that the jazz listener can appreciate while, at the same time, incorporates some familiar hip-hop-esque beats and grooves that my classmates can reach out to. And while I could just listen to Glasper himself, he also serves as an introduction to the artists of two musical worlds that he combines: the artists of the hip-hop world – like Lupe Fiasco and the others above – and the artists of the jazz world – Herbie Hancock, Christian McBride, Derrick Hodge, and others. As your high school jazz kid, I need musicians like Glasper and the kind of variety of music he produces to introduce my classmates to jazz – a steady balance between traditional jazz and other contemporary styles of music (with the exception of the Robert Glasper Experiment, which pushes the boundaries a bit father from jazz and closer to other styles).

In terms of general relatability, he exudes quite the vibrant personality onstage and in print. The same awkwardly quiet jazz club that I visited in New York City was filled with laughter only a week later while I was listening to a live feed of Robert Glasper at the Village Vanguard via NPR. Although his words might be outrageous from time to time, it’s the combination of the relatability of his music and his relatability as a person that makes his music easier to grasp as a high school listener.

There’s so much more that can be said about Glasper and his music, but I’ll leave you here with the video of Glasper that always comes to my rescue when I run into someone that declares that they dislike jazz, and a brief interview with Robert Glasper and Lupe Fiasco.

Rachel Cantrell, The Jazz Post