Á

phone call from Glasper, who summoned
him to Capitol Studios in Hollywood—he was
pinching himself. The feeling only intensified
when Hancock, impressed by what he had
heard on To Pimp A Butterfly, suggested they
work together.
“It felt like all the years listening to the
quintet, listening to Plugged Nickel, practicing,
it seemed like it just made sense that day,”
Martin said. “Because of a hip-hop record I
wound up back to my foundation—one of my
leaders, my heroes, who I studied almost every
day of my musical life. That was a lesson of how
hip-hop brought that together.”
The collaboration, he said, has been far
more rewarding than he expected. “Working
with Herbie feels new every time, whether we’re
in the studio or on the bandstand. Some of the
most exciting moments of my life thus far have
already been with him, musically, creatively, in
conversation—he’s a great teacher, a great mentor
and of course a master at what he does.”
Offering further evidence of a jazz/hip-hop
nexus, Martin likened Hancock to Lamar:
“What’s cool about working with Herbie and
Kendrick—something they have in common—
is that everything is happening right there. The
ideas are in that room and everybody’s giving
their best. They’re both cutting-edge and into
breaking the rules for the right reason.”
Martin said that his presence in a Brooklyn
restaurant, being interviewed for a jazz magazine,
constituted a kind of rule-breaking—or at
least evidence that the rules have changed since
the days when the lines dividing jazz and popular
genres were more clearly drawn.
“Right now jazz is in so much music,” he
said. “Twenty or 30 years ago, DownBeat
wouldn’t be talking to me because people
believed that what jazz was isn’t what they
believe it is today. What I see happening is the
titles going away and people saying, ‘We’re here
to hear some good music again.’
“I look at hip-hop and jazz as one thing. I
think there’s boring jazz like there’s boring
hip-hop. I think there’s good jazz like there’s
good hip-hop. But I think the younger generation—18,
19, 20 years old—they don’t call it
jazz; they call our name: ‘That’s Robert’s record,
that’s Thundercat’s, that’s Kamasi’s.’
“There are a lot of traditional, straightahead
musicians who don’t agree with the things that
they do. They never have. And that’s OK.”
Undaunted, Martin said, he will continue
to break down barriers, getting out the message—even
beyond the boundaries of music—
with a collective he is forming with Glasper and
Los Angeles singer-producer James Fauntleroy.
The immediate intent, he said, is to write films
and produce music that showcases the performing
talents of others.
The tendency for Martin to favor presenting—at
the expense of performing—was
already evident by the time he produced his
2013 full-length debut, 3ChordFold (AKAI/
Empire), and its successors in the 3ChordFold
series. The guest lists included Lamar,
Fauntleroy, Snoop Dogg and other artists who
knew how to play within Martin’s subtle but
complex environments. The tendency continued
to reveal itself with Velvet Portraits, the first
release on Martin’s Sounds of Crenshaw label.
The collective will continue to play to
Martin’s strengths as an organizer, Glasper
said, recounting his yeoman effort on To Pimp
A Butterfly. “That album alone—it was Terrace
putting that together—put the world on a tilt,”
Glasper said. “It put jazz in a place where it
hasn’t been in a really long time.”
But wherever jazz may be today, Martin
said, it won’t be there tomorrow if he has anything
to say about it. “Every time I have an idea
of what’s going to be happening, I go against the
grain and change it. I don’t want to be in a box. I
don’t want to get used to one thing. I don’t want
to make another To Pimp A Butterfly.
“Everything we did yesterday is gone.” DB
FEBRUARY 2017 DOWNBEAT 33