by Nate Chinen
There’s a bit of flexing in “J Dillalude,” as if Glasper were waving a flag. But the track doesn’t feel out of place on In My Element, because he intersperses other interludes and fade-outs that point toward the same coordinates. A rustling waltz called “Of Dreams to Come” finishes with a coda of hypnotic chords and breakbeats; something similar happens at the close of “Beatrice,” the Sam Rivers ballad. And “F.T.B.” is a track whose lilting melody and skittering beat feel like a Dilla homage even without a telltale source to point to.
Glasper had arrived in New York City from Houston in 1997, to attend the New School. (In Houston, he’d attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the same institution that produced Jason Moran.) On the first day of his freshman year, Glasper met a vocalist from Philadelphia named Bilal Oliver. They fast became friends, circulating the same handful of scenes. This was the late nineties, so they logged time at Electric Lady Studios during the Voodoo sessions, and were present for portions of Like Water for Chocolate. Though a few years younger than the Soulquarians, they were obvious kindred spirits.
And when Bilal made his debut album, 1st Born Second, Glasper was an integral part of the process. He was there when Dilla created the humid, disjointed fever dream of bass and drums on a track called “Reminisce,” which featured verses by Mos Def and Common.
“We watched him make that beat,” Glasper recalled. “He knew what the song sounded like in his head. The bass line alone is from four different albums. It’s three or four notes of four different bass lines.”
Glasper grew familiar with Dilla’s brand of sorcery, recognizing in it a creative impulse closely related to jazz: “He was an extremely melodic producer. I’d watch him make beats and it would kill me, the stuff he would use. And the way he built his beats had a jazz spine, because it felt like a live drummer messing around. Like, he would just take four bars from the middle of a drum solo, and that’s the beat.”9
This imagination and execution were enough to mark J Dilla as a visionary, but Glasper also knew him as a real-time improviser. There were informal, closed-door jam sessions where he’d be playing Fender Rhodes piano, with Bilal singing freestyle and Dilla tapping beats on an MPC, the hands-on drum machine and sampler manufactured by Akai.
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Glasper radiates a garrulous, slangy charisma along with his untroubled self-assurance. When I first met him in person, during the 2005 recording session for Canvas, his Blue Note debut, I noticed how loose and jocular he was between takes, and how quickly he snapped into focus when it was time to play. Already he was straddling two worlds, backing Q-Tip or Mos Def one night and leading his postbop trio the next. He had joined the RH Factor on its first tour. At the time, Glasper professed no intention of merging jazz and hip-hop in his own music: “I keep them separate because they are two separate things,” he said. “Every time I play something, I want to be authentic in it. I don’t want to sound like I’m playing at jazz, or sound like I’m playing at hip-hop.”10
But his hemispheres were already beginning to bleed into one another, defying an either/or dichotomy, on In My Element. J Dilla had a lot to do with that. By 2007, one year after the producer’s untimely death, it had become fashionable in progressive hip-hop to drop his name, if not his beats, as a signifier of taste. He was a less familiar reference point in jazz, despite some direct connections. The first of many posthumous releases bearing J Dilla’s name was The Shining, which he’d almost completed before his death; its finishing touches were entrusted to a close friend and fellow Detroit producer, Karriem Riggins, also known as a first-rate jazz drummer. Riggins had been working with Common and others, as a producer and a drummer, even as he kept up notable sideman affiliations with the pianist Mulgrew Miller and the bassist Ray Brown.
While his main outlet was still the acoustic trio, Glasper had been messing around with tricked-out R&B hybridism on the side. He reconnected with a friend from Houston, the virtuoso drummer Chris Dave, and brought in the saxophonist Casey Benjamin, who doubled on vocoder. The last piece of the puzzle was Derrick Hodge, a bassist and composer who had come up around the Philadelphia scene, playing jazz, gospel, and soul. Hodge was a member of the Mulgrew Miller Trio, alongside Riggins; he also worked with the trumpeter Terence Blanchard, in a band full of hyper-proficient young players with no hangups about genre.
The Robert Glasper Experiment grew out of a series of freewheeling underground club gigs, coalescing around the lineup of Glasper, Benjamin, Hodge, and Dave. The band’s proficiency and style-blending flexibility made it an instant draw in the bohemian sector of hip-hop and R&B. When the neo-soul singer-songwriter Maxwell made his high-profile return to performing in 2009, the band he took on tour was a modified version of the Robert Glasper Experiment, with Hodge as band director. More than one observer likened the level of musicianship and spirit in Maxwell’s arena retinue with that of the Soultronics on the Voodoo Tour.
Glasper released his third Blue Note album around this time, calling it Double Booked. The Experiment appeared on the second half, following a first half by the trio. “I wanted to express what was going on with me at that time: touring with Maxwell or Mos Def but playing at the Village Vanguard also, in the same week,” Glasper explained.11 So the title was literal. But it would be reductive to say the album showed two sides of his personality, because Glasper was just as expressive with his hip-hop affinities in the acoustic trio as he was in the Experiment. A trio arrangement of Thelonious Monk’s “Think of One,” for instance, interpolates the vamp from “Stakes Is High.” That ability to emulate a Dilla track without sounding self-conscious or forced—something that had become an issue in certain jazz circles—was still a point of pride for Glasper. “Nobody plays Dilla like us,” he told me. “End quote.”12
But he wasn’t just seeking a vehicle for tribute. When he conceived the first full album by the Experiment, he set out to synthesize the full range of music he’d been involved with over the years: state-of-the-art acoustic jazz, underground hip-hop, organic R&B. That album—Black Radio, released on Blue Note in early 2012—featured an array of guest vocalists, including the rapper Lupe Fiasco and the singers Lalah Hathaway and Ledisi. The album was made in four days with almost no overdubs, making it all the more impressive how much the music could sound fully produced. A version of “Afro Blue” has Erykah Badu over a head-bobbing groove, a light patter of keyboards, and an ethereal waft of flutes; it could pass for a fresh Dilla production.
Black Radio won the Grammy for Best R&B Album in 2013, upsetting a field that included R. Kelly, one of the genre’s biggest stars, and Anthony Hamilton, one of its most admired. The scale of the surprise could be judged by the placement of Glasper and his bandmates in the auditorium: they were seated so far back in Los Angeles’s Staples Center that the camera operator had to swoop around to find them. It took the band a full minute to reach the stage, at which point Glasper was apparently still in shock. “Thank you for allowing us to play real music,” he said from the podium, “and to play what we really feel from our heart.”
The success of Black Radio, in commercial as well as institutional terms, quickly led to a sequel. Glasper stocked Black Radio 2 with another elite assemblage of talent, including Snoop Dogg, Common, Norah Jones, and Jill Scott. This album yielded a Grammy too. (By then, Chris Dave had left the Experiment for his own groove laboratory, the Drumheadz; his replacement was Mark Colenburg, whom Glasper had recommended to Common years earlier.) The Experiment released a third album, ArtScience, in 2016, and on some level it signaled a show of force: there were no guests this time around, as if the band no longer needed the extra shine.
As Glasper gained more visibility, he made a point of speaking out about jazz’s failure to reach a broader public. One central problem, as he saw it, is that jazz musicians had grown accustomed to playing more for one another than for the lay listener, boosting the music’s c
omplex obscurities at the expense of clarity and emotion. He saw the Experiment as one solution to that problem, especially as its influence began to spread among younger players—something he noticed, traveling around the country to various schools.
“After we won the Grammy, I think it opened a lot of minds, it opened a lot of doors for other people who are doing shit that’s not mainstream,” he said. “You have to do it like D’Angelo did it. He said fuck it—and boom, that became the neo-soul movement. And I think we’re the second coming of that. Because neo soul had a nice wave in 2000, all these artists started coming through. I think we’re the start of this new sound that is coming from the blood of that era.”13
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One year after Glasper and his crew pulled a dark-horse win for Best R&B Album at the Grammys, something analogous happened in the category of Best R&B Performance. From a nominee pool that included Anthony Hamilton and Tamar Braxton, the winner in 2014 was an upstart jazz-funk band called Snarky Puppy, for a track featuring vocals by Lalah Hathaway.
The track was a cover of “It’s Something!”—from an early-eighties album cut by the quiet-storm R&B singer Brenda Russell. And the key to how it won Best R&B Performance probably rested in the last word of the category, “performance.” Hathaway, whose father was the transcendent singer-songwriter Donny Hathaway, begins at a low, slow simmer and gradually dials up the intensity through a series of improvised “aah”s, “whoa”s, and “ooh”s. She’s scatting, very much like a jazz singer, over a cycle of chords that seems to keep lifting her skyward.
Snarky Puppy had developed an ingenious custom of recording its albums live in a studio setting, with an intimate audience wearing headphones patched into the board mix. The band made a point of filming these sessions and posting the videos online—partly as a means of self-promotion and partly to prove that no tricks or shortcuts were involved. Hathaway’s performance of “Something,” from the album Family Dinner, Volume One, took place in an ornate 1920s auditorium, but with the audience seated onstage, around the band.
Watching this footage, as some Grammy voters presumably did, it’s impossible to miss how in tune the musicians are with Hathaway’s dynamics and phrasing. And when, after more than six minutes of steady buildup, she flips into her head voice and sings a split-tone multiphonic chord, you see members of the band reacting with awestruck glee. She repeats this otherworldly vocal flourish, slotting her “chord” into the harmonic progression of the song, and this time the musicians lose all composure: laughing and hooting in disbelief, jumping up and down. It’s a moment of extravagant vocal command, teed up perfectly by the band. (It probably changed the industry perception of Hathaway, who won Grammys in each of the next two years, including another for Best R&B Performance, backed by the Robert Glasper Experiment.)
There were many in the jazz world who had never heard of Snarky Puppy in 2014, though the band had been on its grind at that point for a decade: crisscrossing the country in vans, sleeping on floors and in sketchy motels, amassing a fan network in ways both newfangled and old-fashioned. The band’s raging subcultural success was reminiscent of that moment, around the turn of the century, when jazz musicians were heavily mingling with jam bands—playing to crowds that lived for the spark of improvisation but had no taste for a quiet policy and two-drink minimum.
But Snarky Puppy wasn’t really a jam band, a point perhaps best articulated by Charlie Hunter, who played with his share of them in the early 2000s. “Almost all of them were not really ready as musicians, but their business sense was unbelievable,” he said. “I was telling my friends at the time: ‘You know what? This is a drag, to be here and have to listen to this every night. But I tell you, one day, someone who can really play music is going to figure this out.’ ”14 By his estimation, Snarky Puppy had been the band to finally answer that call.
The band’s origins suggest a fortuitous alignment of formal training and casual application. Michael League was a bassist struggling through the rigorous jazz program at the University of North Texas when he got nine friends together to play a regular session. Their early gigs were at coffee shops and the basement of a pizza place. League was already writing fusionesque music with a foundation in groove, but he made a crucial leap forward under the wing of an unlikely mentor: the keyboardist Bernard Wright, one of Hargrove’s “Texas cats.”
A former session ace turned crossover R&B artist who had moved from New York to Dallas, Wright played a regular gig at Riverwalk Fellowship Church, in Haltom City, a suburb of Fort Worth. Through a contact made at a jam session, League started playing there too, initially taken aback both by the high level of play and the intensity of connection with the congregation.
“It was basically Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor,” League recalled of the Riverwalk Fellowship band personnel. Eventually he brought some of his North Texas colleagues into the fold, playing several services a week. “So that’s where the web kind of expanded, and where the music went from white jazz-school stuff to something much groovier, much funkier, much more communicative with the audience. Less nerdy.”15
Snarky Puppy developed a brawny but hair-trigger-responsive style, and a high bar for group cohesion. The question of where its music fell on the jazz spectrum was, at best, a tertiary concern. But the sound of the group owed plenty to the jazz tradition, especially if your idea of that tradition extended to, say, Weather Report. A League composition like “Lingus” suggests a contraption made up of whirring parts, arranged in a way that feels like clockwork but allows for stretching out at strategic junctures. The video for “Lingus,” from the 2014 album We Like It Here, became a must-see in musician circles precisely because of a blazing and harmonically venturesome synthesizer solo by Cory Henry. The band’s chief drummer, Robert “Sput” Searight, was also a regular source of wonderment, with a diehard following in both hip-hop circles and music schools. League’s core achievement was in forming a flexible framework that could accommodate this level of virtuosity without becoming simply a fireworks show.
Whether the band “belonged” to jazz or not, the jazz establishment put up relatively little resistance to Snarky Puppy. This may have been a result of market forces: it was voted Jazz Group of the Year in the 2015 DownBeat Readers Poll. It appeared on the magazine’s cover the following year, a few months before playing the main stage at the Newport Jazz Festival. For his part, League expressed no pretensions about the band’s music, instead describing it, accurately, in terms of catchiness and groove. (The best comparison wasn’t to Weather Report, in fact, so much as to a hook-laden band like the Crusaders.)
“Did I think we would ever win a Grammy?” League said during a conversation over coffee in 2016. “Of course not. Did I think we would ever sell four thousand tickets? I never expected or thought of that, but I planned for it, always. It’s like, if you don’t plan for it, it won’t happen. You don’t have to expect it or feel like you deserve it, or even want it. But be ready.”
At that moment, the coffee shop playlist landed on something familiar: “Playa Playa,” the opening track from D’Angelo’s Voodoo. League chuckled. “It’s going to be difficult for me to speak while this is playing,” he said.16
Even more than most successful jam bands, Snarky Puppy mobilized its influence—starting a label imprint, GroundUP, to release its own music as well as solo albums by band members and efforts by friends like Hunter and the singer-songwriter Becca Stevens. League produced a series of albums for the label, including one by the folksinger David Crosby, who’d become a passionate fan of Snarky Puppy after watching their videos on YouTube. Beginning in 2017, the band also presented a GroundUP Music Festival, taking over a patch of Miami Beach for several days with a lineup that included jazz musicians like Terence Blanchard and John Medeski. Among the artists in the 2018 edition were Glasper, Joshua Redman, and the electronic-meets-analog entity known as Mark Guiliana’s Beat Music: jazz players
laying in the pocket, in a way that felt free of cynical compromise but expressly concerned with making bodies move.
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Mark Guiliana’s Beat Music is a prime example of the new rhythm genius finding expression among improvisers in the new century. Guiliana, a jazz-trained drummer who combines an aerial view with a microscopic attention to detail, formed Beat Music with the idea of exploring ideas from progressive electronic music: in interviews, he liked to cite the trippy UK beatmakers Squarepusher and Aphex Twin in the same breath as the jazz drummer Tony Williams. Much like Chris Dave, Guiliana became a cult hero, the sort of player that other drummers, in whatever genre, couldn’t stop obsessing over. He was also similarly in demand as a collaborator; he had a regular hookup with the keyboardist Jason Lindner, and Brad Mehldau sought him out for a duo project, Mehliana, eventually releasing an album by that name.
To the extent that there was an intrepid new wave of fusion at ground level, its creative locus had little to do with Snarky Puppy. One of the driving forces was Kneebody, another band that originally came together through a conservatory connection but built momentum through word of mouth. Most of the band—trumpeter Shane Endsley, keyboardist Adam Benjamin, multireedist Ben Wendel, and bassist Kaveh Rastegar—first met at the Eastman School of Music in the late nineties. Kneebody officially came together later, in Los Angeles, with the addition of drummer and producer Nate Wood. The band created its own niche with a convergence of strategies pulled from indie rock, hip-hop, electropop, and chamber music. (As with the West Coast Get Down, members of Kneebody held a range of sideman affiliations.) The band’s following, like its music, couldn’t be pinned down to one scene. But if you had to point to the musical lineage best suited to accommodate the music of Kneebody, it would be fusion.