Thoughts on Robert Glasper’s OG acoustic trio live at Blue Note NYC, 10/16

[u/lifecurrent111]

We fly up from Florida every year for Robtober—my wife’s birthday lines up with the residency, so it’s become our annual jazz weekend. Caught the OG acoustic trio on the 16th.

First song: “Rise and Shine” from Canvas. It went like this. Damion Reid starts the loose, elastic beat. Everyone in that small room is exposed to the complex interplay of the snare and kick drum (aka the Dilla thing™)… and then Vicente Archer joins, playing a sort of front-loaded counterpoint on bass. The whole thing feels like a giant dog loping in two film speeds at once—one stride stretched out in slow motion, the other compressed and surging. From that point forward, the set really became about the groove.

Rob riffs angular lines with left-hand/right-hand simultaneity, like a demented Oscar Peterson. But the main thing: he stays completely locked into the pocket. He’ll do uber, UBER economical Thelonious Monk references—just short, staccato bursts of sound. His play on the rhythmic pulse shows extreme subtlety, and suddenly the lick is “Afro Blue”—DJ Jahee Sundance playing around with the Erykah Badu sample through gauzy reverb. Everything gets hushed. I’m five feet behind Glasper, staring at his back, and for a second the only thing I can hear is the harmonic overtones inside the Steinway bed.

And that’s the thing. These explorations, based on the pulse and the rhythm, create an intermezzo where thoughts and ideas wink in and out of existence. At one moment it sounds like church, at another it’s a line inspired by Mulgrew Miller (or Cecil Taylor).

A part of me that likes straight-ahead post-bop wants to say the bebop flashes are too brief, too thin. Maybe he’s bored by the old moves, or just doesn’t need them. But another part of me thinks this doesn’t have to be straight-ahead jazz. Maybe—though I’m no expert—it’s pushing improvisation deeper into the groove, and into whatever rises out of it, rather than treating melody and call-and-response as the main event.

This is more about how his pocket keeps circling back to anticipation. He sits less in the lineage of Armstrong and Parker and more as a DJ—someone who lets small harmonic and melodic moments surface from the groove instead of forcing them. In a way it’s a different art form than “just jazz,” even though this acoustic trio is the most jazz of any of his setups in the residency. Maybe that’s why some jazz people push back on it. I don’t think he cares.

There is a surrender to it. During the bass solo he got off the stage, wandered the crowded floor with a toothpick in his mouth like a museum curator, nodded at old friends, got a gin and tonic, and looked lost in what Vicente Archer was doing with harmonics. When he came back he closed with “So Beautiful,” Musiq Soulchild’s voice coming through Sundance’s mic, telling the women in the room to “know how beautiful they actually are,” because “the only thing that really matters is how you see yourself.” Anyone who knows the song knows it was the right ending. It made the humility I’d been feeling all night suddenly atmospheric.

[u/Gfun92]

Thanks chat gpt

[u/lifecurrent111 → u/Gfun92]

Wrote every word myself. AI assisted in editing certain lines, but thanks for reading!

[u/Gunzhard22]

Lots of reports from his latest shows that he's just drunk and obnoxious and people regret spending the money. 🤷

[u/Maykeda]

Robert Glasper sounds exactly like what I keep thinking I want but I haven’t the patience to explore his back catalog enough to understand what’s he’s doing. I bought an album because it had Ledisi. I just read the title and now I feel like a chump. Robert Glasper EXPERIMENT. Okay, I get it now.

[u/Unlucky_Skirt_8371]

I really like his early trio stuff , and not so much his deviation from that into hip hop or what not.

[u/okonkolero]

Was there an intermezzo?