A New Kind of Blue: The Power of
Suggestion & the Pleasure of Groove
in Robert Glasper’s Black Radio
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.
Astratto: This essay places the important Robert Glasper Experiment recording “Black Radio” (2012)
within its artistic, commercial, and critical contexts. As a project that combines genres, “Black Radio” did
more than challenge different communities of listeners; it invited them to see how Glasper’s sonic juxta-
positions could be logically aligned. Jazz, hip-hop, R&B, and gospel merge in “Black Radio” to form a
stylish, forward-looking contribution that won popular and critical successes. Glasper and his ensemble
toy with the social contracts that have established boundaries around sonic language; Infatti, he makes
their territories feel seamless and natural. Because of the success of the project, we may be witnessing a
post-genre moment that disrupts traditional ideas about music that have been preciously held in the
industry since it emerged in the late-nineteenth century.
“Changing the game!” exclaimed the press photog-
rapher at pianist Robert Glasper’s standing-room-
only appearance at World Café Live in Philadelphia
in the spring of 2012. “Yeah, no doubt,” a middle-
aged man shot back in enthusiastic agreement. IL
midsized auditorium was ½lled with an interracial,
intergenerational crowd of listeners enveloped in
the mesh of sound worlds that Glasper presented
with both commitment and ease.
The audience’s enthusiasm for the Robert Glasper
Experiment’s landmark 2012 release Black Radio
(Blue Note)–and its accompanying promotional
tour–was af½rmed by the American music indus-
try’s arbiters of taste. To much surprise, Black Radio
received a Grammy Award nomination in two cat-
egories: Best R&B Performance for “Gonna Be
Alright (F.T.B.),” featuring Ledisi; and Best R&B
Album. Even before it debuted, there was steady
buzz about what the recording’s aesthetic ap –
proach and its critical reception might mean to the
future of jazz. Now, in the wake of its release, it is
© 2013 by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.
doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00240
GUTHRIE P. RAMSEY, JR., is the
Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn
Term Professor of Music at the
Uni versity of Pennsylvania. His
publications include The Amazing
Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History,
and the Challenge of Bebop (2013),
Race Music: Black Cultures from Be –
bop to Hip-Hop (2003), and the forth –
coming Who Hears Here?: Essays on
Black Music History and Society. He is
also pianist, composer, and arranger
for the Philadelphia-based band
Dr. Guy’s MusiQology.
120
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clear that Black Radio’s influence extends
well beyond the jazz world, as evidenced
by the R&B branding. Like Miles Davis’s
pivotal 1959 album Kind of Blue, Quale
signaled a new direction for modern jazz,
Black Radio may indeed qualify as a game
changer.
New York Times music critic Nate Chi-
nen wrote that Black Radio was “the rare
album of its kind that doesn’t feel strained
by compromise or plagued by problems
of translation.”1 Such a synthesis of
styles is quite a feat given that jazz, R&B,
and hip-hop have developed dissimilar
social contracts with audiences, a chasm
made glaringly clear by hip-hop’s emer-
gence as a commodity in the 1980s and
the almost contemporaneous “young
lions” movement that shot Wynton Mar –
salis and his co-conspirators of young,
mostly male jazz musicians to stardom.
In public and private discourse, these neo –
classicist hard boppers were pitted against
the sample-½lled digital soundscapes of
hip-hop producers (“they are not even
‘real’ musicians”) and their rapping,
rhyming counterparts (“they are really not
musicians”). Although some critics could
engage with each of these sound worlds,
many listeners remained wedged between
polarizing aesthetic discussions that in –
spired a politics of division.
That was the 1980s. Dramatic changes
in the recording industry over the last
½fteen years have opened up new creative
opportunities for artists, and musicians
are taking full advantage of them. Talented
independent engineers and producers,
armed with relatively high-quality per-
sonal recording studios, have increased
exponentially; it’s now a literal cottage
industry. And because of the digital revo-
lution, which provided cost-effective ac –
cess to cutting-edge technologies, many
musicians have become astute in engi-
neering and production in addition to
their more traditional competencies in
composition and performance, as well as
in marketing and promotion. This new-
found freedom has allowed ambitious
musicians and producers to break out of
genre boxes and craft conceptually adven-
turous projects. Some creators intention-
ally share their work free-of-charge on
the social media sites Facebook, Twitter,
and YouTube before they actually “drop”
through traditional commercial avenues.
Many recordings appear only in these on –
line outlets and attract thousands of lis-
teners without the help of a record label.
A new music economy has been estab-
lished, in which record and marketing ex –
ecutives no longer exclusively determine
what music is entitled to widespread dis-
semination. One of the most exciting
results of this shift is that informal musi-
cal collectives have begun to work across
genre lines (those imaginary sonic bound –
aries that exclude more than they invite),
creating new audience alliances as well.
Although he is contracted with Blue
Note, the label historically associated with
“straight-ahead” jazz, Glasper proves him –
self in his latest release to be in the avant-
garde of this exciting new aesthetic wave.
That is not to say that there are not
sonic precursors to Black Radio’s appealing
new sounds. Chinen’s article mentions a
few such milestone performers: Miles
Davis, Guru, A Tribe Called Quest, De La
Soul, and Roy Hargrove. Each artist/group
has produced projects that blend elements
of jazz with those of other popular styles.
We can push the list back further in time
to include innovators like pianist Ramsey
Lewis, the father of “soul-jazz,” who has
continued to build a vibrant career slid-
ing effortlessly across the jazz/pop con-
tinuum. The clear-headed and creative ad –
venturer Herbie Hancock, pure, stands as a
towering inspiration to genre-crossing
artists, both in spirit and in technical exe-
cution.
Guthrie P.
Ramsey, Jr.
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142 (4) Autunno 2013
121
A New
Kind of
Blue:
Robert
Glasper’s
"Nero
Radio”
And we must not overlook, as is all too
often the practice, the important women
contributors to this aesthetic shape-shift-
ing sensibility. Gospel great Elbernita
“Twinkie” Clark’s songwriting, singing,
and Hammond B-3 playing did much to
set that genre on an unapologetic and
sonically ecumenical path throughout the
1980s and beyond. Pianist and composer
Patrice Rushen’s work boasted a pre-
scient eclecticism that surely provided
neo-soul rhythm and acid jazz tracks
some of their harmonic approaches.
Bassist and songwriter Meshell Ndegeo-
cello’s virtuosic musicianship and fluency
in hip-hop, pop, funk, soul, and jazz–and
the singular and courageous way she
combines the genres–must be consid-
ered a signpost in this discussion.
As a subject of written criticism and
promotion, as a live performance event,
and as a recording, Black Radio deserves
our careful attention. But precisely what
part of the Black Radio project suggests
that we are in the midst of a post-genre
moment, a wholesale realignment of the
traditional social contracts governing
music creation, dissemination, and con-
sumption in the industry? Black Radio’s
sense of aesthetic balance–of getting it
just right–is key to our understanding,
and it may be derived from two provoca-
tive musical choices: 1) a self-conscious
foregrounding of digital technology in
the soundscape, including tricked-out
mixes and effects, among other tech-
Carino; E 2) a harmonic palette drawn
from the progressive post-bop vocabu-
lary, featuring close, infectious harmonies
that pivot around common tones and
shifting tonal centers. The songs are oth-
erwise characterized by the careful align-
ment of sonic symbols from across the
historical black popular music sound-
scape. Here, Glasper’s aesthetic strategy
positions him to assuage the traditionalist
criticism of his dual pedigree in hip-hop
and jazz, while also providing ample space
for experimentation.
Beginning with an impressive set of trio
recordings in the tradition of, most obvi-
ously, bebop pianist Bud Powell (always a
litmus test for the modern jazz pianist),
Glasper’s recorded output gradually
moved into other conceptual and sonic
territories. Brands are powerful entities,
particularly in the music industry. Al –
though he claims roots in gospel, R&B,
jazz, and hip-hop, Glasper entered into
public awareness as a “jazz pianist,” and
it is hard to break away from that rubric
once it sticks. The same is true for any artist
whose work is marketed in a system that
makes money from rigid predictability.
This “agreement” becomes a social con-
tract that ultimately seeks to dictate what
artists produce, how companies sell con-
tent, and the spending and listening habits
of speci½c demographics. Although Glas –
per was branded as a jazz musician, he has
also maintained highly visible collabora-
tions with the revered hip-hop producer
and beat-maker J Dilla (James Dewitt Yan –
cey) and the rapper Q-Tip (of the critically
acclaimed group A Tribe Called Quest).
What we think of as the essence of jazz
today developed during the 1940s bebop
revolution. As historian Scott DeVeaux
has explained:
In the wake of bebop, we no longer think of
jazz improvisation as a way of playing tunes
but as an exacting art form in itself that
happens, as a rule, to use popular music as
a point of departure. In the hands of a jazz
improviser, a copyrighted popular song is
less text than pretext. Its crucial identifying
feature–melody–is erased in the heat of
improvisation, leaving behind the more ab –
stract and malleable level of harmonic pat-
tern. Out of the ashes of popular song comes
a new structure, a new aesthetic order,
shaped by the intelligence and virtuosity of
the improviser; and it is to that structure,
122
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and that structure alone, that our attention
should be drawn.2
This aesthetic order, grounded in virtu-
oso spectacle, has been both a blessing
and a curse; it is an ideal that has, on the
one hand, created expressions of sublime
beauty and, on the other, eroded the eco-
nomic base of the once popular music
with exercises in abstraction that some
claim are too dif½cult to decipher.
The world of hip-hop, Glasper’s other
pedigree, has its own social contract and
historical groundings, though some of its
more infamous themes of nihilism, mi –
sogyny, and political confrontation have
tended to eclipse the dynamism of its de –
½ning musical traits. Nonetheless, as a sys –
tem of organized sound, it has (like con-
temporary gospel music) flaunted an ir –
reverent and irrepressible voracious muse,
absorbing sound elements as quickly as
they appear in the public sphere. Likewise,
hip-hop has demonstrated similar senses
of portability together with the re in force –
ment and transcendence of ethnic identi-
ties as they have been bound to speci½c
sound organizations.
Glasper’s Black Radio project intelli-
gently and artfully indexes these histories.
Infatti, all of the sonic and social agree-
ments of hip-hop, jazz, and gospel (Glasper
grew up playing in church) congeal in
thought ful, groove-based arrangements
on the album (and in the live shows,
though in different ways). When we con-
sider the crafty details of the songs, their
conceptual and technological framing,
their harmonic environment and relation-
ship to popular song, their virtuosic per-
formances, and their accessibility and even
spirituality, we can better understand
Black Radio as an example of “post-genre”
black music. The project plays with sonic,
social, and iconic symbols in a way that
recalibrates calci½ed, boring ideas about
genre, and turns them on their head with
a good sense of funky adventure.
142 (4) Autunno 2013
As the music scholar and cultural critic
Mark Anthony Neal has written in his
insightful review of Black Radio, the use of
the terms post-genre and black music might
seem oxymoronic.3 What Neal is indicat-
ing, Ovviamente, is that the concept “genre”
operates as an index of sound and the
social ideas assigned to it. In other words,
people socially agree on what sounds
mean, to what community they “belong,"
and what extra-musical connotations
they might convey. So if it is post-genre,
where does blackness ½t in?
Neal’s meditation on the project situ-
ates Glasper’s Black Radio in the historical
context of black American radio stations,
which reinforced the personal connection
between Glasper’s album and my experi-
ences growing up listening to the Chicago-
based station wvon (Voice of the Negro).
Chess Records executives Leo nard and Phil
Chess owned the am station from 1963
until Leonard’s death in 1969. They pro-
grammed it all: gospel, blues, jazz, R&B,
pop, and because it was Chicago, some
more blues. Musical ec lecticism de½ned
the station’s community of listeners, link-
ing the generations with an “open-eared,"
aesthetically patient tem perament: one of
your songs was surely coming up next.
Tellingly, when I visited Glasper’s home-
town of Houston a few years back, IO
noticed the same ecumenical historical
consciousness on its radio stations.
But we have largely lost our expansive
tastes to the corporate pressures put on
program directors to maintain the strict
social contracts of genre. And this is the
very reason that audiences (E, ironically,
the industry) have enjoyed Black Radio’s
nod back to that more eclectic time, E
why I use the forward-looking term post-
genre to capture the project’s pulse, con-
tour, and impact.
Every track on Black Radio rewards–a
high standard not often met these days,
Guthrie P.
Ramsey, Jr.
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123
A New
Kind of
Blue:
Robert
Glasper’s
"Nero
Radio”
particularly with projects of this size. IL
most attractive sonic features, as I have
stated above, derive from how the digital
aspects of the recording share the fore-
ground with Glasper’s signature harmonic
approach. Another feature that departs
from the jazz social contract, as laid out
by DeVeaux, is how the project is con-
sciously not dominated by heroic virtuoso
solos. These fresh elements, of course,
also contributed to Black Radio’s Grammy
nominations in the R&B category, Piuttosto
than in Glasper’s “brand” category, jazz.
Glasper’s individualized progressive
post-bop vocabulary is instantly recog-
nizable. The project collapses this ap –
proach, Tuttavia, with another aesthetic:
gospel music. One cannot help but asso-
ciate the way that his talented band–
Derrick Hodge (bass), Casey Benjamin
(vocoder, flutes, saxophone), and Chris
Dave (drums)–hit strong pocket grooves
with all the deep soul of a sancti½ed Pen-
tecostal band. They languish over the
rhythmic and harmonic possibilities of
these grooves, subtly twisting, turning,
and burning as if these manipulations
were the point of the whole endeavor.
With all the dramatic innovations that
have recently occurred in gospel music,
one quality has held strong: the love of
repetitive grooves that work the spirit,
providing a platform for some of the
most moving singing and instrumental
improvisations in the industry. Black Radio
brims with this groove-centered aesthetic.
Take Glasper’s rendition of “Cherish
the Day,” a cover of the chanting groove-
tress herself, Sade. The original, released
In 1993, is emblematic of a core aesthetic
of urban pop styles of the last twenty
years: verse/chorus song forms built on
identical chord structures. This quality
has become ubiquitous in R&B/urban
soul songwriting because of the spillover
effect of hip-hop’s cyclic loops. Che cosa
separates Glasper’s interpretation of this
overused technique, Tuttavia, is that his
ensemble has taken the concept–an ana-
log interpretation of a digital concept–
and injected the improvisational free-
dom of the jazz/fusion/funk sonic com-
plex. Consider Casey Benjamin’s unpre-
dictable and expressive synth solo on
“Cherish the Day”–doubled in parallel
intervals throughout. It is a husky state-
ment reminiscent of Chick Corea’s Elek-
tric Band of the 1980s. How the band
keeps the groove pitched just hotter than
a simmer beneath his improvisation is a
marvel of group interplay. It sounds like a
very hip church fanning up some com-
munity spirit. Why rush through it for
radio’s sake? Moving the spirit takes time.
With regard to female singers, there is
plenty here to appreciate. There is the new –
comer, Ledisi, the ½rebrand vocalist with
grit, riffs, and range; Meshell Ndegeocel-
lo’s warm molasses presentation; Chris –
ette Michele’s breathy and sensuous croon;
Erykah Badu, the priestess of the neo-soul
movement of the 1990s; and Layla Hath-
away, daughter of the iconic singer Donny
Hathaway, who possesses her father’s
same appealing melismatic execution.
Hathaway’s reworking of “Cherish the
Day” exhibits the best qualities of her
vocal presentation: an open-throated,
well-supported, and sultry alto voice,
captured effectively by the studio engi-
neer. Breathy vowels abound as she moves
through tasty melodic lines, working
over chord changes like her father, Ma
with much more economy. Lesser-known
female singers, sisters Amber and Paris
Strother and Anita Bias, offer further neo-
soul-ish warmth to the project.
The stylistic inclusivity is not limited to
the performers; note how Chris Dave’s
drum sound is engineered in places to
throw back to early-1990s hip-hop sam-
ples. Nel frattempo, the lavish background
vocals on the old school slow jam “Oh,
Yeah,” featuring Musiq Soulchild and
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Ms. Michele, harken back to R&B duet
sensations Donny Hathaway and Roberta
Flack, but with the complexities of a Jaguar
Wright multitrack vocal symphony. E
Glasper’s acoustic solo after minute four
of the track–a tasty ride over a Fender
Rhodes drenched soundscape–suggests
how this recording might have sounded
if long instrumental solos had been the
emotional focal point of this project.
Scattered and unusual mixes, electronic
effects, stylistic juxtapositions, fade-ins,
oral declamations, and rhythmic chants
combine to frustrate efforts to “place”
this music. The most experimental tracks,
showcasing the male voices of Lupe Fiasco,
Bilal, Sha½q Husayn, Stokely, and Mos
Def, crisscross generic markers with diz –
zying aplomb. Packaged with a statement
by writer Angelika Beener–less liner
note than manifesto–the album an –
nounces itself as something new, a turn
toward breaking out of the sonic/mar-
keting formulas so prevalent in today’s
industry offerings. The most important as –
pect of this “announcement,” however, È
Questo: Black Radio allows the music to do the
real preaching. Così, we hear the band’s
“post-genre” gesture as a suggestion, non
a mandate. In other words, only the mu –
sic in the totality of our experience, music
that is boundaryless, market-resistant,
artistically adventurous, and conceptually
focused can take black music back. Free
black music!
endnotes
1 Nate Chinen, “The Corner of Jazz and Hip-Hop,” The New York Times, Febbraio 24, 2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/arts/music/robert-glasper-experiment-to-release
-black-radio.html?pagewanted=all.
2 Scott DeVeaux, “‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’: Thelonious Monk and Popular Song,” Black
Music Research Journal 19 (2) (Autumn 1999): 172.
3 Mark Anthony Neal, “Liberating Black Radio: The Robert Glasper Experiment,” The Huf½ngton
Post, Marzo 9, 2012, http://www.huf½ngtonpost.com/mark-anthony-neal/black-radio-album
-review_b_1326449.html.
Guthrie P.
Ramsey, Jr.
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142 (4) Autunno 2013