Robert Glasper
Robert Glasper is the idol of the youth and the originator of the trendiest and most vibrant projects in modern jazz, R&B and hip-hop.
At the beginning of the new millennium, Robert Glasper released a number of successful solo albums on the major jazz label Bluenote Records. However, he achived real worldwide fame and won two Grammy Awards with the release of Black Radio (2012) and Black Radio 2 (2014) featuring such superstars as Erykah Badu and Snoop Dogg. Collaborating with hip-hop artists holds a special place in the musician’s work – he played on the most remarkable rap album of the new century, To Pimp A Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar, collaborated as a sound producer with Mos Def and Bilal, and performed with Kanye West and Jay-Z. “Robert Glasper heads down the fraught path of hip-hop jazz and gets it right,” the Rolling Stone review of Black Radio says.
He is also known as a film score composer. Miles Ahead, the 2015 Miles Davis biopic, won Robert Glasper a Grammy. In 2017, he also received an Emmy Award for the track Letter to the Free, co-written with Common, from the soundtrack to 13th (Netflix).
In 2015, Glasper recorded the acoustic album Covered (Bluenote records) with his trio consisting of Vicente Archer (upright bass) and Damion Reid (drums). The album was their first acoustic release in eight years. “I missed the piano,” Glasper said simply, explaining his decision, because for the past five years he had focused almost exclusively on keyboards and electronic sound in his Robert Glasper Experiment project. However, jazz standards are far from being the only tracks on Covered, the tracklist including ingenious instrumental versions of songs by Radiohead, Joni Mitchell, John Legend and Kendrick Lamar, as well as several Glasper’s originals