Thinking back to the impact of last year's unofficial "Blue Note night" at the iTunes Festival and to when José James and the Robert Glasper Experiment appeared, by the time Glasper's follow-up to Black Radio comes out on 28 October it will be well over a year since his iTunes appearance. In terms of the way the pianist/keyboardist/composer's music has reached new audiences, not to mention gaining a milestone Grammy along the way, iTunes might as well have been a century ago. Somehow, and the process started way before Black Radio, nearer the time Glasper began to tour with Maxwell or even before, music fans, not just jazz-only fans, but certainly non-aligned hip hop and flavour-of-the-day non-jazz fans, woke up to what the pianist is capable of providing above all in terms of more accessible commercial music sitting alongside his jazz side. The Experiment in Blue Note parlance reaches "beyond entrenched genre boundaries", and looking at the line-up for Black Radio 2 the chances are Glasper will make many more new friends, probably lots more, than he risks losing old ones. Many of the vocalists and rappers to grace the new record are pretty familiar, and in some cases big stars including Common, Anthony Hamilton, Norah Jones, Snoop Lion, and Emeli Sandé. I for one can't wait to hear 'Somebody Else' featuring Sandé. People all over the country will hear Glasper's name for the first time if the song catches. Black Radio really worked and Glasper's jazz fan base stayed put, but already at two of the live shows of Glasper's I saw last year there was considerable change compared with the Double Booked days and before. The improvisation factor was considerably less than it used to be, in a nutshell. Will Glasper, the most talented jazz pianist to emerge in America since Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer, keep firing the imaginations of jazz fans worldwide? Or will they move on to the next hotshot just hovering into view on the horizon? The stakes have never been higher. SG
Robert Glasper top and with the Experiment