Robert Glasper Experiment photo by Mike Schreiber
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4, TRIPLE DOOR, 7PM & 9:30PM
$24 general, $22 Earshot members & seniors, $12 students
This year’s festival ends with Blue Note pianist Glasper’s kind of slap, with Derrick Hodge (bass), Mark Colenburg (drums) and Casey Benjamin (sax, vocoder).
Fresh on the heels of Black Radio and Black Radio Recovered: The Remix EP, Glasper brings a quartet of East Coasters with their dials tuned to gospel, hip-hop, rap, jazz, rhythm and blues and rock. Do they cross genres? Well, Kanye West and Yasiin Bey, aka Mos Def, crashed a recent New York club date.
Glasper was born in Houston, attended the city’s High School for Performing Arts and then The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in Manhattan. He hooked up with singer Bilal Oliver and mixed with Mos Def, Q-Tip, Kanye, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, Jay-Z and Talib Kweli. His early recordings cover tunes by Herbie Hancock and Duke Ellington.
St. Louis drummer Mark Colenburg attended Mannes School of Music in Manhattan on scholarship, where he studied with Lenny White, Joe Chambers, Michael Carvin, Carl Allen and Andrew Cyrille.
Casey Benjamin hails from South Jamaica, Queens. He performs on saxophone and vocoder – the voice synthesizer first used in WWII for encrypted communication. Benjamin went to school at LaGuardia High School of Music, Art and Performing Arts, followed by The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.
Philadelphia native Derrick Hodge began on guitar at age 7, switched to electric bass and finally to upright bass before attending Temple University, where he studied jazz composition and performance. He’s studied with bassist Christian McBride, and under the mentorship of composer Terence Blanchard, Hodge developed into a performer and composer for film soundtracks. He composed, performed and produced two Grammy-winning recordings – one for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album and another for Best Rap Album.
Glasper’s band plays original songs, with creative angles on popular repertoire – Mongo Santamaria, Sade, David Bowie, Nirvana. “We all have musical ADD,” Glasper says, “and we love it.”
