Rehearsing The Blues

"A Man Of Many Dimensions": Interview With Robert Glasper

Note: I conducted this interview for Nextbop, and you should check it out there if you have the time. I wrote a nice little introduction and everything, so it's totally worth it, Click here. Click it. Here.

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Nextbop: Thank you very much for doing this. I know you must have a busy schedule.

Robert Glasper: No problem.

NB: Well, let's just get into it. First question is, what was your mission making Black Radio? What did you want the music community to know when they saw this record in the music store and listened to it for the first time?

RG: That I'm a man of many dimensions, and many sides. Now I'm just exploring my more hip-hop/soul side, but still jazz-infused. So really this is like a good collaboration album of hip-hop, soul, jazz... You know. I think I'm the first one to actually do it right.

Roundup #4 (New Releases)

More 2011 pop and hip-hop releases. Read about others here.

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Lupe Fiasco, Lasers (Atlantic) I don't know what would have happened if Lupe Fiasco, one of the best rappers working today, had released the original conception of this album: a three-disc set called LupE.N.D. that would have been the rapper's last release ever. However good or bad that record might have been, though, I'm glad Fiasco's contract obligates him to two more albums, because it means there's more of him coming in the near future. And I don't think the three-disc full-stop that he originally wanted could have come close to Lasers - and if this is how good Lupe has become, I don't think it could have come close to his next two albums, either. Lasers is a lean, concentrated hip-hop statement, full of anger, sadness, joy, hope, and fear - all of the humanity that mainstream hip-hop has lost. Fiasco is a major-label artist, and while some in the rap community wish he would go indie (think what heights he could achieve, they cry, and with reason), I'm glad he hasn't: the major-label rap game needs songs like "Till I Get There," a relentless track packed with piano, drums and Lupe himself ("Doctor doctor please, the fame ain't painless enough / That's 'cause you ain't famous enough / You got a little name, but your name ain't ringing enough"), or the witty "All Black Everything" ("First 400 years, see we actually enjoyed it / Constitution written by the W.E.B. DuBois / Were no reconstructions, Civil War got avoided / Little black Sambo grows up to be a lawyer"). An indie Lupe might be able to do these songs better, but I'll happily settle for the Fiasco we have. He's up there with Kanye and Common, and he'll just get better over the next two albums. If Lasers was all we ever got, it would be enough.

Roundup #3 (New Releases)

Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here. Those installments were for 2011 jazz releases; this article is for pop and hip-hop releases. Read on.

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Tyler, The Creator, Goblin (XL Recordings) Say what you will about Tyler, The Creator - he's offensive in en entirely new way. This is why, if I was called upon to give Goblin, Tyler's first non-Odd Future release, a star rating, it would be 4 stars. Love it or hate it, you've got to respect the guy. I happen to hate it, but that's beside the point. The real point, for me at least, is that Tyler is forging his own path through rap, with a unique rhyming style, a distinctive production sound, and signature themes for his songs (signature not in their subjects but rather in how extremely those subjects, usually violence, apathy and sex, are portrayed). It's not good, not yet anyway, but it's important. This is far from a mature musical statement, and from what I know of its maker, he doesn't want it to be. Tyler's challenge for the future will be to make a balanced, mature album that unabashedly promotes his immature themes - only then will he be able, by combining a clarity of vision he now lacks with the rawness of his present material, to make this one-man's-trash into everyone's treasure.

A Story No One Told

UPDATE: "You sure have a lot to say without knowing enough," was the reply from @REVIVEmusic (the Twitter account for The Revivalist) to this article (they have since apologized). I'm sorry, guys. I guess every time I mention your site I need to go back through all my beliefs that what you are doing is necessary, important, and exhilarating for a fan of jazz, hip-hop and live music, just so you won't jump down my throat.

Listen. I watch your videos (all of them!), I read your articles and interviews. Yes, I'm critical sometimes - that doesn't mean I'm belittling your mission (I am a critic, after all!). Honestly, when I have something critical to say, I say it with the hope that my subject can put that criticism in context - the context of support and constructiveness that I've tried to foster here at Rehearsing The Blues.

That said, I wrote this article quickly and with some emotion behind it. Reading over the passages where I mention The Revivalist, I see that as the article progressed, I started using your site as a kind of figurehead for something it really doesn't represent. I've tried to remedy that here. Thank you for bringing that to my attention, albeit in a roundabout and less-than-polite way.

Nevertheless, my criticism of the overall polarization of the intelligent critical commentary surrounding rap stands as stated here, and that includes you in both senses: firstly, everyone at The Revivalist is smart about what they listen to, and you contribute to that intelligent commentary; but secondly, the nature of your mission and focus places it at one end of a spectrum of commentary. It isn't a bad thing, that's just how it is. This article is stating the need for a middle ground, a site or critic not limited by a focus such as "live music in NYC." You guys have that scene covered. I'm not asking you to change. I'm asking someone else to add to the overall discourse.

So thank you, The Revivalist, for reading and letting me know, in your own way, that you read Rehearsing The Blues. This is my way of letting you know I read your stuff, too, and that you get me thinking - not always in happy ways, but always in meaningful and important ways. Thank you.

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Shad is a name that should appear much more often in articles and analyses of hip-hop today. The Canadian, Kenyan-born rapper (full name Shadrach Kabango) has three official albums to his name, the most recent of which, TSOL, was released on October 10th, 2010. He tours the United States and Canada, he's won (but more often almost won) a few awards in Canada, and I can almost guarantee you've never heard of him.

Every Flow Has Its Ebb (Or Should, Anyway)

“Don't 'over-control' like a novice pilot. Stay loose enough from the flow that you can observe it, modify, and improve it."

-Donald Rumsfeld

Reading the critics' choice of new releases at The New York Times, I was pointed to the music video for Chris Brown's single, "Look At Me Now," which features the questionable talents of Chris Brown & Lil Wayne and the sorely over-featured but wonderful Busta Rhymes. Now, I'm going to put all my cards on the table: I think this is a terrible song. I don't like Chris Brown; he had a knack for making something catchy way back in the early days, but after a long period of not-really-repentance for beating up Rihanna two years ago and now this ill-advised foray into the misogynous, sex-obsessed turf of commercial rap, Brown is starting to wear his expiration date on his sleeve.

But to fault commercial hip-hop or R&B for being misogynous and violent and so on is to oversimplify. These are songs, and they are made up of all the elements of music we're used to hearing in the more "mind over matter"-type hip-hop espoused by a Common or a Questlove, or even the "mind in spite of matter"-type hip-hop coming from Kanye West. But, somewhere, these elements - lyrics, beat and melody - are skewed and twisted into something awful.

Utter Chaos #2 (Jon Wertheim)

A Blog Supreme's interview with Robert Glasper has drawn some comments on the Facebook page for Blue Note, the pianist's label, on the subject of hip hop and jazz. I read some, having written about the issue before here on RTB. Two comments struck me in particular. One says:

Jazz and hip hop go hand and hand? Jazz is for smart people. Rap is for stupid people who don't know what real music is. It all sounds the same with its degrading of women in the lyrics. It's gang member music. It promotes violence. Jazz has skilled musicians. Rap has nothing but fast talking ghetto players who make noises with their mouths and play records backwards. Big difference!

The second says:

I try to remain open but on the whole, the sound of hip hop hasn't evolved very much, in my opinion. I'm happy to listen to something in 3/4 or with an orchestral backing, or something else that offers an alternative to the norm.

It doesn't matter who wrote these - my point is that these are the views of many jazz fans, and they need to change. These guys aren't necessarily malicious, they just suffer from common misconceptions about a genre whose most prominent artists do indeed get their exposure not from great music but from questionable off-stage antics. The issue is the generalizations that arise from that - it's like saying every jazz musician does heroin, or plays the trumpet, or dies early.

Ugly Beauty.

I was watching West's short film Runaway for the third time, and I finally put down the last piece of the puzzle I've been working on ever since I first started exploring Kanye's music and persona - Kanye West is Thelonious Monk.

The Bizness

 

This is it, folks. This is the article where I say that Common, formerly Common Sense, formerly Lonnie Rashied Lynn, Jr., is just like John Coltrane.

For those of you readers who aren't familiar with Common, he's a rapper from Chicago who came of age in the early to mid-1990s with some incredible records, and after a decade and a half, he's become an important, if slightly lost, hip hop statesman - you could think of him as the Joshua Redman of hip hop. As for John Coltrane, he was the greatest tenor saxophonist of the 1960s, and one of the best of all time (I would say the best, but I can't get Sonny Rollins out of my head). In 1956, Rollins made a record for Prestige called Tenor Madness, and the title track featured Coltrane as a "guest artist." The record is pretty average (at least when compared to Rollins' other albums from the same year), and the tune is a pretty routine blues, except for the opportunity it gives us to hear two of jazz's most important tenor saxophonists playing together. Forty years later, in 1996, hip hop group De La Soul came out with one of hip hop's most vibrant statements, Stakes Is High. Aside from the Plugs themselves, there are some guest spots on the album - Mos Def, for one - but the best, in my opinion, is Common's moment in the spotlight, on the track "The Bizness."

So how are Common and Coltrane the same again?

You'll Know When You Get There

Herbie Hancock, 1985: "I would venture to say that it has a lot to do with the music I'm playing now. Electric music, you know. I'm finding a door that hasn't been opened. That's exciting me, and I'm given the opportunity to use some elements from the 'farthest out' jazz stuff in this music, and have it be unique."

Jazz has always been involved with popular music. In past decades, that relationship has been more regulated - the more straight-ahead artists were famous in the jazz world, and "crossover" artists like Louis Armstrong were famous in the pop world and the jazz world. But since George Benson and Freddie Hubbard fixed in the mind of the jazz audience the idea of "selling out" to popular tastes, and since Kenny G put - for much of the world - the sounds of elevator music to the name "jazz," the issue of pop and jazz has become more complicated. But if these musicians have come to define the melding of pop and jazz in the past, some younger musicians are seeking to change that definition.