Robert Glasper: In My Element

CML call number: CD JAZZ Glasper
Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times: "The depth of the pianist Robert Glasper's art so far has been about coordination: making all members of his piano trio move together as a single organism. It's the best part of his gigs, this stealthy motion; it's coordinated and dense. … Mr. Glasper still claims hip-hop as fertile source material. On half the record the drummer Damion Reid and the bassist Vicente Archer play spongey, changeable adaptations of hip-hop rhythm tracks, and Mr. Glasper himself plays as if he's a living sample, running off a truncated-sounding series of chord changes and playing them with the trio in a kind of real-time loop. When he does this at length, in the gospel-influenced 'Y'outta Praise Him,' it sounds like a new kind of songwriting. In 'J Dillalude' he folds the idea back on itself again, isolating clips of himself and the band playing this way for short stretches and then running the clips together into a digital pastiche. These aren't the only song fragments on the record. … (His mashed-together versions of Herbie Hancock's 'Maiden Voyage' and Radiohead's 'Everything in Its Right Place' qualify as fragments too.)" (3/19/07)