Robert Glasper is bucking the trend.
At a time when more young, conspicuously talented musicians than ever before are arriving on the jazz scene it's often noticeable at gigs that they don't seem to have brought any friends of the same age along to listen to them.
The obvious inference is that jazz is for older audiences. But it doesn't have to be that way, says Glasper, whose most recent album for the legendary Blue Note label, Black Radio, has reached the Top 20 in the American pop charts and led to him appearing on television programmes that are normally beyond the reach of jazz players.
Such success has come to jazz musicians occasionally over the past three or four decades – Herbie Hancock's Headhunters album and George Benson's In Flight being prime examples – and the reaction from within the jazz scene has been accusations of selling out.
The Houston, Texas-born Glasper will tell you, though, with his laid back, Southern way, that in working with stars of rap and hip hop to create Black Radio, he hasn't so much sold out as reached out.
"You have to make jazz relevant to younger people," he says down the line from New York during a lay-off between trips to Australia and Japan and the European tour that will bring his band, the Robert Glasper Experiment to Glasgow Jazz Festival this week. "I'm 34 and while I think it's great that my great-grandmother would love Polka Dots and Moonbeams because she remembers having her first kiss to that song, it's not a number that means much to people of my age generally, let alone the younger kids we should be targeting."
For Glasper, playing songs associated with rappers and singers Q-Tip, Mos Def, Bilal and Erykah Badu, all of whom he knows well and has worked with, is continuing the jazz tradition at least as honestly, if not more so, than working with the standard repertoire.
"The hip hop and R&B songs you hear on the radio or blasting out of a car sound system are the pop songs of today," he says. "They are what's happening now and that's what jazz musicians have always done – they've taken the pop songs of the day, songs that are already familiar to people, and put their own stamp on them. So when young people come to one of our gigs, they'll hear something they know. We use that to draw them in to what we're doing and then, when we play something original or something by Thelonious Monk, say, they get it. Ultimately, people want to hear good songs played with feeling and you have to satisfy that need."
Glasper had first-hand training in the art of choosing good songs. His late mother, Kim Yvette Glasper, was a pianist and professional singer who used to take the young Robert to her gigs instead of hiring a babysitter and would have him accompany her as she worked on new material, or just fancied putting on a show for the two of them, at home. As Glasper's earlier Blue Note albums amply confirmed, his upbringing in church, where he first appreciated harmony, also fed into his music along with the Earth Wind & Fire tracks he listened to at his mother's insistence and the indelible influence of Thelonious Monk.
"I still listen to Monk and still find him inspiring," he says. "The hip hop fans who come along to our gigs recognise where he was coming from, too, because I always say that he was the first hip hop piano player. He was always so far ahead of his time that he still sounds current – he probably always will – and if you listen to the way he played behind the soloists on these records from the 1940s and 1950s, that's the roots of hip hop right there in those rhythms. That's what we have to remember: hip hop was born out of jazz, so there's a natural connection."
One of Glasper's favourite experiences over the past couple of years was appearing at Carnegie Hall in New York with Gil Scott-Heron not long before the man dubbed the godfather of rap died. Having graduated from the prestigious New School in Manhattan, a few years behind fellow pianist Brad Mehldau, Glasper had been settled into New York for more than a decade by this time and had become used to being touted as one of the major jazz piano talents of his generation. He was still awed, however, by the significance of appearing in this venerable venue's first acknowledgement of rap with a personal hero and one of the movement's real idols.
"That was amazing," he says. "Just to be in the same room with someone who had so much history and who had created so much great work was an honour. Gil was someone I listened to a lot as I was growing up and what I loved about him was, as much as he'd done as an artist – and he'd done a lot – he never stood still. He was always searching for the next thing. He was a real jazz cat in that respect and we could all learn from his example."
The Robert Glasper Experiment plays the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, tonight
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