indie-only chartruse vinyl version - The third instalment in jazz pianist Robert Glasper’s Black Radio series of crossover albums opens with a track about African-American tribulations that revolves on a pointed contrast between sight and hearing.
“In Tune” features the poet Amir Sulaiman reciting verses about racism over a sombre, Radiohead-influenced piano melody. Race hatred is figured in visual terms, as the act of oppressors who “unless they need you, they act as if they don’t see you”, and as a “disease that sees us as less than . . . human”. Resistance comes in the form of sound. “So we don’t play music, we pray music,” Sulaiman declares. As his voice gets louder, the musical accompaniment swells with crashing cymbal-work and a climbing trumpet solo. “I come from a people transmuted, transformed by song,” he cries. The radio of the album’s title is an instrument of liberation.
This insistence on freedom is characteristic of Glasper’s work. The Houston-raised, Los Angeles-based pianist describes himself a “musical mutt” whose work is centred on jazz but also draws on R&B, soul, rock and hip-hop. Now 43, he has mainly recorded as bandleader of two groups, the Robert Glasper Trio, an acoustic trio, and the Robert Glasper Experiment, an anything-goes electric quartet. He cites Herbie Hancock as an inspiration, a stylistic adventurer who gained mastery as a pure jazz keyboardist before crossing into other genres.
| A1 | In Tune |
| A2 | Black Superhero |
| A3 | Shine |
| B1 | Why We Speak |
| B2 | Over |
| B3 | Better Than I Imagined |
| C1 | Everybody Wants To Rule The World |
| C2 | Everybody Love |
| C3 | It Don’t Matter |
| D1 | Heaven's Here |
| D2 | Out Of My Hands |
| D3 | Forever |
| D3 | Bright Lights |
