Week 21: Robert Glasper Experiment’s Black Radio

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There is no doubt that pianist and composer Robert Glasper is a pioneer of jazz, given his recent release of Robert Glasper Experiment’s Black Radio in 2012.

Before we dig into what the album is, let’s look at the huge who’s-who list of featured musicians on Black Radio who made the record what it is.

Musicians featured on the record include Shafiq Husayn, Erykah Badu, Lalah Hathaway, Lupe Fiasco, Bilal, Ledisi, King, Musiq Soulchild, Chrisette Michele, Meshell Ndegeocello, Stokley, and yasiin bey.

The band includes Chris “Daddy” Dave (drums), Derrick Hodge (bass), Casey Benjamin (saxophones/flute/vocoder).

Some call this record jazz, neo-soul, r&b, or hip hop; in reality it is all of those things, but Black Radio cannot be defined merely as a collection of genres. The record is truly symbiotic to its core: all these varied artists came together to record a unified sound, and there isn’t anything on the record that is noticeably out of place. Glasper has expressed that with this album, he wanted to show music lovers that an artist can create with others who are not immediately in his/her genre, and that the record represents the sense of family in creating music with others.

Each track features Robert Glasper’s unique style on either piano or Fender Rhodes. His sense of harmony is characteristically much more rooted in gospel than in jazz, and he has a light touch to the piano. Glasper’s improvisation throughout the record is mainly diatonic; when he does go “out”, he is improvising with a focus more on upper structure chords than the tensions themselves. The sounds of the band are relatively unaffected by post production techniques. Most of the drum sounds in the record are all almost dry, despite obvious EQ and short reverb. Bass and piano are all unaffected by post production throughout. This record does an outstanding job of letting the sound of the instruments themselves breathe and become as human as possible with as little affect as possible.

Black Radio is an expression of many musicians of different backgrounds joining and creating music together. The sound of the record is as human as you can get, and yet has room for electronic production, synthesizers, and affected vocals. No matter how you define this record — jazz, R&B, neo-soul — there’s no denying that this is music at its finest.