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Robert Glasper

In My Element

Blue Note 0946 3 78111 2 2

The piano trio is a core jazz format, sensitive and immediately responsive to current musical fashion. Consequently, changes in trios' approach to repertoire and delivery can act as useful harbingers pointing to stylistic developments in the music ’ viz EST, Bad Plus, Curios etc.

Robert Glasper is as at home in the world of hiphop as he is in jazz (he's MD for Bilal and Mos Def as well as having played in Carmen Lundy's band and various outfits led by the likes of Terence Blanchard and Charles Tolliver), and his music reflects his experience perfectly.

Both on this, his latest album, and live (he recently enthralled a full house at the Pizza Express) he manages to filter widely varying material ’ Herbie Hancock's 'Maiden Voyage', mixed into Radiohead's 'Everything in Its Right Place'; the gracefully hymnic 'Y'Outta Praise Him'; a relatively straightahead tribute to Mulgrew Miller, 'One for 'Grew'; a cogent visit to Sam Rivers's 'Beatrice' plus a raft of infectiously rhythmic originals – through a jazz sensibility imbued with the musical values – the slinky accommodating grooves, the dynamic and textural variation, the hypnotic slow climaxes of hiphop.

The result is a powerful, wholly absorbing set, not of the customary theme-and-variation-type music associated with the genre, but of slithery, mesmerising grooves spun out of catchy little motifs or rhythmic figures, addressed with inventiveness, wit and panache by Glasper himself, and crucially underpinned by bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Damion Reid, together a superbly sensitive but vigorously interactive unit taking the piano trio in a refreshingly novel direction.