Review: Robert Glasper at Royal Northern College of Music

Image: Robert Glaspar

Covered, Robert Glasper’s latest offering and current touring album, is exactly what it sounds like, which again sounds nothing like what it is. It’s a cover album, yeah, but this is jazz; source material traditionally functions more as a jumping off point, or a loose blueprint from which to build and deconstruct – to twist and reshape, subvert and embrace – than as a restrictive dot-to-dot gimmick.

Though covers are intrinsically referential, novel in their comparison to their source material, and accessible in their familiarity, Glasper never falls into the fatal pitfall that is the genre cover band.

He approaches each piece as if they were his own visions of jazz standards, expertly veering off in exploration of the space the originals created.

Having achieved notable personal exposure over the past three years, in contrast to his existing industry prevalence – for context, his Discogs production credits take me eight full-length smartphone swipes to get to the bottom of – and having worked and performed with the likes of Mos Def, Bilal, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Kanye West, and quite extensively on the magnum opus that is Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, he’s something of a modern day Quincy Jones, or Lamont Dozier, or George Duke – omnipresent and auteur-like, their names humbly tucked away in hundreds of liner notes, the fate behind romance that nobody knows exists.

That was the case with Glasper, at least, until Black Radio – the funk/jazz/soul/R&B/hip hop meta-album that earned him a Grammy for Best R&B Album in 2012, the follow-up to which, Black Radio 2, again saw him nominated in 2014. Glasper, signed to the prestigious Blue Note Records, now finds himself between the mainstream and the tributaries, apparently concerned less with where he stands than with the fact that it’s all just water, and it‘s all flowing in the same direction.

On the night, the penultimate evening of the 20th annual Manchester Jazz Festival, he emerged from the backstage shadow under a pool of red light, unassuming in basketball sneakers, baggy jeans, and a t-shirt. “Coooool”, he said, as he does on the album – knowingly awkward, as if in bemusement of the peculiarly formal scenario he found himself in.

He introduced the band, the original musicians from his 2005 album, Canvas: on drums, Damion Reid, whose left arm I’m near certain could outdrum Pat Metheny’s clockwork Orchestrion; honestly, I’ve never seen anybody play trap percussion in real time.

Next, the man holding the double bass: “Oh that’s err, Bassy Mike”, he gestured, mic in hand. The audience applauded and the band cracked up in hysterics, eventually letting us in on the joke, “I said that’s a bassy mic!” It broke the ice. He loved it. The bassist’s name became known soon after – Vincente Archer.

The trio opened with their rendition of Prince’s ‘Sign of the Times’. Lush and elegant, as spacious and considered as the trio’s stage arrangement, Glasper dexterously flicked the keys as though he were a touch typist, seemingly spending most of the night looking at the inside of his eyelids. At this level of almost psychic intuition, sight evidently proves irrelevant.

He’s a very likeable character, mischievous at times, with a smirk creeping across his face as he teases his collaborators. At one point a sort of musical whack-a-mole game developed out of the frantic introduction to ‘In Case You Forgot’, the intricate timing of which I can only explain away as telepathy.

The set led us through faint imprints of ‘Afro Blue’, reimagined from Black Radio, and Glasperised, as he put it, versions of Radiohead’s ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ interwoven with 'How Much A Dollar Cost' from Kendrick Lamar, an audience-requested ‘So Beautiful’ from Musiq Soulchild, and an amalgam of various J Dilla beats, telling of his interests, which neatly brought everything full circle: jazz inspired hip hop inspired jazz.

Amongst all this the band took the opportunity to sneak in ‘Stellar by Starlight’, the Victor Young jazz standard, and just like that we were listening to jazz on its own terms, none the wiser, indiscernible from the covers.

During Glasper’s own ‘Jelly’s Da Beener’, probably my favourite piece, I looked around and people had smiles on their faces, entranced. Every so often I could faintly hear those brief staccato nasal exhalations marking amusement, and at moments it’s exactly that – these musicians are so good at what they do that it’s funny. Such geniuses of their craft, they created a performance as fascinating for its spectacle as for its music.

Glasper’s piano was fugue-like at points, – the musical equivalent of drawing a circle with one hand and a square with the other – his lower hand so steadfast, no matter where the other took it, you’d think he were live-looping.

Reid’s drums were fluid and intuitive, during his solo functioning on their own sonic plane divorced from tuned instruments, the art of which arises in finding unique rhythm, in creating a stylistic avatar. All the while Archer’s lethal bass, temporarily let loose, strutted through the PA.

The show came to an end almost abruptly, giving the impression it could've gone on indefinitely, which actually wouldn’t be that unlikely; I’ve seen Robert Glasper four times in his various incarnations and he’s never played for less than two hours, on one occasion playing for nearly three. Upon returning for the encore, he casually took the request of a girl in the audience, making her night and effortlessly tapping into the Canvas throwback ‘Riot’, seemingly unrehearsed.

In a sense, Covered is microcosmic of Glasper’s career so far – free from pretension, it familiarises the unfamiliar, drawing new and old fans, innovation and tradition, and hip hop and jazz together and inwards, which, for all its rebelliousness, never once appears insolent or iconoclastic to either.

Follow Matt on Twitter @JechtRye

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