Remembering, Repeating, and Something New: Robert Glasper's Black Radio 3

When I first heard the song “Better Than I Imagined” by the Robert Glasper Experiment (featuring H.E.R. and Meshell Ndegeocello), it was for me technically not. I'd had no time to imagine it at all; I was already late to its arrival. More or less since I began training to become a therapist, I found myself devoting an interval of time around the holidays collecting the songs that have spoken to me throughout the year, trying to “hear the year” through them. So I was mildly shocked last year to learn that the 2020 Grammy for Best R&B Song had been awarded to a song I had never heard of by an artist, Robert Glasper, whose work I had been quite closely following for some time.

A prolific pianist who arrived on the jazz scene from Houston via the New School in New York in the 2000s, Glasper had never confined himself to traditional jazz territory; the hypnotic, sampled loops pioneered by the late producer J Dilla (a near-mentor of Glasper's) grounded his musical sensibility in the repetitions and allusions of hip-hop, while his harmonic language tended toward a palette frequently found in R&B songs and, more surprisingly, British rock. By the time he released his third album, In My Element (2007), Glasper was seamlessly weaving the main figure from Radiohead's iconic “Everything in Its Right Place” (to which we shall return) into his own take on Herbie Hancock's immortal “Maiden Voyage.”

I have never followed jazz closely (not for lack of trying), though I have always kept an eye on the blurry threshold between jazz and pop music, so Glasper (a prime blurrer of that threshold) had popped up on my radar when

he released the first installment of Black Radio , which has since become a series of albums. At the time, I was under the spell of Erykah Badu's own New Amerykah series and voraciously consuming all things Ery