Robert Glasper
The pianist Robert Glasper draws some of his notions of live jazz from J Dilla’s form-bending hip-hop records, and some of his notions of hip-hop from jazz’s subtle group interactions, and he’s starting to resemble a strong force in jazz right now. “Double-Booked,” his new album on Blue Note, advances both halves of his musical life: the Robert Glasper Trio, with the bassist Vicente Archer and the drummer Chris Dave, and what he calls the Robert Glasper Experiment, which includes Mr. Dave as well as Casey Benjamin on saxophones, Derrick Hodge on electric bass, vocals by Mos Def and Bilal, and Jahi Sundance on turntables. The Experiment half is where you find the harder funk, soul singing and--whoa!--vocoders, but both halves use slow-rolling grooves, excitable solo passages that gather up stride piano in its reach, and intricate rhythm-section arrangements as sharp and stylized as Thelonious Monk’s. (In an answering-machine message included on the album, the Roots’s drummer, Ahmir Thompson, best known as ?uestlove, calls it “all that oraculous, spaced-out, past-geometry, near-calculus stuff y’all be doing.”) It’s jazz that confidently and rightly assumes new urban black music as part of its basic definition.
The Drums
The Drums are two clean-cut guys from Florida, Jonathan Pierce and Jacob Graham, with a guitar, a synthesizer, a drum machine and just enough songs to ride out the rest of the summer. They do a kind of surfy version of New Order, bright and clattery, a minimalist collision of the 1950s and the 1980s. The best thing about the beach is that it’s so giant and uncomplicated — a way of life broken down to water, sun and rocks in various states of distress. Likewise, the songs on this band’s new EP, “Summertime!” (Twenty Seven), cleave to the basics: all heart and hooks, here the chord sequence from Ritchie Valens’s “Donna,” there a snatch of schoolyard rhyme. “If you fall asleep down by the water,” Mr. Pierce sings in “Down by the Water,” one of several waterside love songs on the record, “baby, I’ll carry you all the way home.”
The pianist Robert Glasper draws some of his notions of live jazz from J Dilla’s form-bending hip-hop records, and some of his notions of hip-hop from jazz’s subtle group interactions, and he’s starting to resemble a strong force in jazz right now. “Double-Booked,” his new album on Blue Note, advances both halves of his musical life: the Robert Glasper Trio, with the bassist Vicente Archer and the drummer Chris Dave, and what he calls the Robert Glasper Experiment, which includes Mr. Dave as well as Casey Benjamin on saxophones, Derrick Hodge on electric bass, vocals by Mos Def and Bilal, and Jahi Sundance on turntables. The Experiment half is where you find the harder funk, soul singing and--whoa!--vocoders, but both halves use slow-rolling grooves, excitable solo passages that gather up stride piano in its reach, and intricate rhythm-section arrangements as sharp and stylized as Thelonious Monk’s. (In an answering-machine message included on the album, the Roots’s drummer, Ahmir Thompson, best known as ?uestlove, calls it “all that oraculous, spaced-out, past-geometry, near-calculus stuff y’all be doing.”) It’s jazz that confidently and rightly assumes new urban black music as part of its basic definition.
The Drums
The Drums are two clean-cut guys from Florida, Jonathan Pierce and Jacob Graham, with a guitar, a synthesizer, a drum machine and just enough songs to ride out the rest of the summer. They do a kind of surfy version of New Order, bright and clattery, a minimalist collision of the 1950s and the 1980s. The best thing about the beach is that it’s so giant and uncomplicated — a way of life broken down to water, sun and rocks in various states of distress. Likewise, the songs on this band’s new EP, “Summertime!” (Twenty Seven), cleave to the basics: all heart and hooks, here the chord sequence from Ritchie Valens’s “Donna,” there a snatch of schoolyard rhyme. “If you fall asleep down by the water,” Mr. Pierce sings in “Down by the Water,” one of several waterside love songs on the record, “baby, I’ll carry you all the way home.”
