Best Music of October, 2009: Double Booked by Robert Glasper

Robert Glasper is a man of many talents. Certainly, he's both an inarguably accomplished jazz pianist and a first-rate composer. But what Glasper does best is pick drummers. With 2007's In My Element, he provided Damion Reid with a platform to record nothing less than the drum performance of the year. For his newest album, Double Booked (Blue Note), Glasper teams up with Chris Dave, and the results are astonishing.

It's a concept album, sort of. The first half features Glasper, Dave, and bassist Vicente Archer. It opens with a voice mail from a worried Terence Blanchard, who has booked the Trio for his club but hears rumors that Glasper's Experiment has plans to play elsewhere on the same night. A handful of originals and a take on Thelonius Monk's "Think of One" follow. Throughout, the piano and drums intertwine with a complex integrity that sounds deceptively effortless. To call it virtuosity is almost demeaning. It simply must be heard. (And to be fair, Archer keeps up.)

Then comes the Experiment: Derrick Hodge replaces Archer with an electric bass, and Casey Benjamin adds saxes and vocoder. Bilal and Mos Def drop in for vocal cameos (welcome and disposable, respectively). The Experiment's five compositions -- including one each by Glasper, Hodge, Benjamin, and Herbie Hancock -- showcase what a second voice mail from the Roots' ?uestlove describes as "miraculous, spaced-out, past-geometry." The Experiment's songs differ in texture and depth from the Trio's set, but the adventurousness of the performances and the gorgeous lyricism of Dave's drumming fuse the album's halves into a single musical statement whose two chapters and two stars make for the year's best jazz album so far.

    --Jason Kirk

P.S. A few more words on Chris Dave, starting with two pieces of advice:

•    If you're a drummer, start listening to Chris Dave now. Right now. Go!
•    If you know a drummer, buy her a copy of Double Booked, immediately.

Why? Well, Dave might just be the best drummer out there right now. His most high-profile gig has been recording and touring with Maxwell, but the man's a collaborative dynamo, the list of musicians who call on him long, ecstatically diverse, and worth discovering on your own. YouTube abounds with disappointingly short clips of his performances, and picking one to include here is an excruciating exercise in unfortunate exclusion. But hey, ChordStrike's here to do the dirty work for you…

Comments

[怀淰＠＾过厾 on September 07, 2010 at 11:56 PM]

differ in texture and depth from the Trio's set, but the adventurousness of the performances and