Robert Glasper Experiment – Artscience (Blue Note, 2016)
I will be writing a column on Length & Time in music, in each presenting an album and its strategies that pertain to addressing Length & Time.
We’re explained Artscience on the track “This Is Not Fear”: ‘my people’s music’. In other words, ‘my people’s music’ is its genre, ‘my people’s music’ is its purpose, ‘my people’s music’ is the root of its songs’ aesthetics.
When famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax went looking for Jazz’s roots (he documents this in the book Mister Jelly Roll) he found himself speaking to folks who all had a trade, a prestigious thing in old New Orleans, played Jazz for the art. Alphonse Picou, a legendary clarinetist, who wrote the classic “High Society,” owned several homes. Eventually, the often creole tradespeople he met were ostracized from the roles they traditionally played in New Orleans society. Some of these creoles became professional Jazz musicians to make a living. Thus began the second chapter to the history of a music meant to both be fine art and entertain seedy society: both an art and a science.
“Day To Day” sounds a bit like disco, with hints of go-go. The singing is auto-tuned which is very unexpected in a Jazz song. The organ playing reminds of a Stevie Wonder performance and the beat Micheal Jackson; it’s a medley of musical goodness. The lyrics are sung in the present tense in which a guy quite plainly tells a girl / boy that he’s “living day day to day” and to “show me the way to your heart”; nothing that would persuade a girl / boy really but easy to sing along to. It ends with the band laughing, as if the end of a Hip Hop song.
Like for “Day To Day,” the lyrics of “No One Like You” are pretty simple and don’t get under the skin. However, they are easy to sing along to. The song’s drums are out of this world, to be up front about listening to them play through this composition. The piano playing is impressionistic, controlled; beautiful.
“Find You” is sung in the past tense and the future tense, in aim to produce an ideal present. The jamming in the song is great Jazz. It’s the best written song on this album and a song for our times obsessed with becoming and with change. “Find you” could be about a man or a woman but it could also be about social peace; the ambiguity of its lyrics makes it phenomenal to sing along to.
This is an avant-garde listen: songs by those who venture out to test the waters, as the term first meant in military speak. This is spirituality, intellect, and beauty.
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Author: Adolf Alzuphar
