Robert Glasper: Canvas

CML call number: CD/JAZZ/Glasper
Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times: "Over the last five years, one of the best musicians to make his home in places like Fat Cat and the Up Over Jazz Cafe has been the young pianist Robert Glasper. He has regularly been great, starting out from powerful, precise expositions of theme and then expanding his area of play, always followed closely by his trio. But the grapevine has its limits: unless you're a New York jazz musician, or you hang out with them, you've probably never heard him. 'Canvas' … shows Mr. Glasper doing what he has done, more or less, in those shows, and that is good. There will be time later to build concepts; the main thing is to get a representative sample of his rolling pulse in improvisations, his sputter of ideas within the close watchwork movements of his regular trio, with Vicente Archer on bass and Damion Reid on drums. Mr. Glasper owes a debt to Herbie Hancock, as do most mainstream jazz pianists who came along in the last three decades, and he doesn't hide it in the album's pretty harmonic changes. But laid thickly over any secondary stuff is his own jittery, hip-hop-altered sense of groove" ("Out of the Small Clubs …," 9/11/05).