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ROBERT GLASPER an angry girlfriend’pete jackson ‘the jazz world seems to be like
people’s perceptions of jazz and what people have been taught that jazz is. A lot of people, like myself, come up in school playing jazz and for the most part they teach you the history…they don’t want to teach you how to be yourself and incorporate things that are modern into your music.
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IF YOU READ LAST MONTH’S PULP, you’ll know we were pretty stoked to see pianist Robert Glasper coming to town for the JZ Festival. We were even more stoked when we got the chance to talk to him. As he prepares to release Black Radio 2, the sequel to the album that simultaneously topped the jazz charts and won a Grammy for best RnB album, he’s as committed as ever to his mission to shake up the jazz scene. Radiohead to Neil Diamond to Cindi Lauper, to Ghostface Killah. He loves to do all kinds of random things, so it’s always fun to collab ‘cos you never know what we’re going to do – we don’t even know what we’re going do most of the time. You’re known for playing tunes by Radiohead, Bowie, Nirvana – why don’t more musicians embrace that attitude? The real attitude of jazz is to play the music of your time period. That’s what all of my heroes did and I feel we should do the same thing. I think playing what reflects your society and playing what honestly influences you is what keeps the music relevant. Unfortunately, too many people in the genre are too hung up on the history, to the point that there’s no future, or they’re erasing their own history. A lot of it has to do with ? Luckily I had a parent that was a musician, my Mom, and she instilled in me to always play what you feel, and that’s the best way to form an identity. And you can’t form an identity just playing the music of a time period that you didn’t even exist in. So, Black Radio 2 – do you feel a lot of pressure for this album? Not really. I thought ‘how am I gonna top part one?’… the only way to really do it is to just do a different album; I didn’t want to make the same album twice. We won the grammy for best RnB album, now we’re in the radar of RnB people…all eyes are on us [so] we wanted to go ahead and just make an RnB album. Black Radio 2 is definitely an RnB album for the most part.
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You’ll be performing at the JZ Festival with Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) - what’s the collaboration relationship like between you guys? I’ve been collaborating with Mos since at least 2005, 2006. He’s such a massive music fan and we’d do anything from
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