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Since arriving to New York from Houston in 1999—first to attend
Manhattan’s New School of Music, then quickly securing gigs with
Christian McBride, Terence Blanchard, Mark Whitfield and
Russell Malone—Glasper has built a slightly under-the-radar reputation
for not only solidifying the bridges between jazz and r&b and hip-hop,
but also as a remarkable talent scout. From working with musicians such
as Q-Tip, Mos Def, Ali Shaheed Muhummad, Bilal, Meshell
Ndegeocello and J Dilla, Glasper has become an A-lister among the r&b
and hip-hop cognoscenti. “I’ve always been like that,” Glasper insists.
“I’ve never been just a jazz nerd. I’ve always had my hands in different
kinds of shit.”
Even while growing up as an only child immersed in gospel, Glasper
was attuned to different music. He started pecking at the piano when he
was 12 at Houston’s East Wing Baptist Church, which he describes as a
small storefront operation near a laundromat. “It might, at the most, have
had 15 members on a good Sunday,” he jokes. Oscar Peterson was
Glasper’s first jazz hero, after listening to his mother play a Peterson and
Ella Fitzgerald recording around the house. By the time he reached 11th
grade, he advanced greatly, performing in the grand Brentwood Baptist
Church, which had up to 10,000 members. At the same time, he attended
Houston’s High School of the Performing and Visual Arts, following in
the footsteps of Jason Moran, who graduated in 1991. “Jason left this big
legacy,” Glasper recalls. “I was the next guy—especially a black guy—to
play piano and jazz and be good.”
That said, Glasper’s music avoids the pitfalls of pastiche. He employs
his gospel, hip-hop, r&b, pop and electronica touchstones more discreetly
than others, opting for an organic sensibility that rhythmically can suggest
the late hip-hop producer J Dilla, the impressionistic improvisations
of Herbie Hancock and the orchestral approach of Erroll Garner.
Sometimes, Glasper can become to the piano what Ahmir “Questlove”
Thompson of the Roots is to the drums: He can emulate the technological
sounds of hip-hop productions organically. He has an uncanny way of
sounding like a sampled loop with all the repetitive nuances, much like
Thompson can replicate the sound of a drum machine.
Several years ago, Glasper proclaimed that he would be the first to
bridge the worlds of jazz and hip-hop successfully. Given that in the last
two decades musicians such as Herbie Hancock, Roy Hargrove, Q-Tip,
Guru, Soweto Kinch, Soulive, Madlib and a host of others have taken on
similar challenges with varying degrees of success, Glasper’s swaggering
statement makes for a tall order. “There’s always a key element that is
missing, either in hip-hop or the jazz stuff,” Glasper argues. “It’s never a
100 percent [for] each of them. It’s always 100 percent this and 75 percent
that. You seldom find guys who are genuinely 100 percent everything.”
When it comes to defining what distinguishes musicians playing at
hip-hop and those who can actually play it, Glasper cites “the feeling.”
“You can tell when a drummer really plays hip-hop or not,” he says.
“It’s the phrasing; it’s the beat; it’s the feel. There’s a feel that’s always
there, especially when you get into J Dilla. Dilla is the hardest kind of
hip-hop to play. When you play some old-school stuff, everything is kind
of on the beat, pretty much like a metronome,” he explains, as he pounds
out the static “boom, bap, boom-bap” beat from Afrika Bambaataa’s
seminal hip-hop classic “Planet Rock” on the table. “But when you get
into stuff where the bass is laid-back, the snare is early [in the groove]
and the bass drum is late, and the piano player is in the middle, that’s a
feel thing.” He uses hand gestures to illustrate Dilla’s keen spatial awareness
and rhythmic ingenuity. “A lot of people try to play hip-hop and it
comes out sounding like funk. Just because you put a backbeat to it
doesn’t make it hip-hop.”
Glasper often compares his formative years in Houston, where
he was often the lonely musical mutt between jazz and gospel
camps, to his early years in Gotham City, where he initially
found it difficult to discover kindred spirits who could easily play jazz
and hip-hop. “Now you have jazzheads who are influenced by hiphop.
And that’s great, but you can tell who’s just jumping on the band-