Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The pianist, producer and composer Robert Glasper was recently recording a podcast about songs people might not realise he has played on, when he suddenly remembered the time he sang backing vocals for Stevie Wonder. It was 2018. Glasper was performing with the rapper Common at a star-studded charity event in Montgomery, Alabama. As Wonder geared up for the finale, Glasper was standing there with Usher and gospel heavyweight Kirk Franklin and the three of them got handed mics too.There can’t be many people who unexpectedly find themselves singing with Stevie Wonder — and then forget all about it. But there’s only one Robert Glasper.We are speaking on the phone ahead of his two-night stint at the London Jazz Festival, to which he’ll bring a sound that encompasses jazz, hip-hop, R&B, funk, gospel, soul, neo-soul, alternative, experimental, acoustic, electric — elements of a hyperactive, eclectic discography.He is wrapping up what New Yorkers with a musical bent know as “Robtober”, his annual five-week residency at the Blue Note club on West 3rd St. Six years ago, Glasper became only the fourth musician, after Chris Botti, Chick Corea and Dizzy Gillespie, to be invited to do such a run. Where Corea and Gillespie were consummate jazzmen, and Botti is the trumpeter who has taken jazz into mainstream pop-chart stardom, Glasper is the younger pianist who has reminded everyone that jazz is what all contemporary Black music, and hip-hop in particular, is rooted in.To map out Glasper’s career is effectively to trace a dot-to-dot of the most important figures in modern Black American music. Starting from before he graduated college, the 46-year-old has directed, recorded with and composed for the biggest names out there, everyone from George Clinton, Erykah Badu and Anita Baker, to Harry Belafonte, Kendrick Lamar, Jill Scott and the director Ava DuVernay. When Glasper turned 40, Herbie Hancock donned a grey turtleneck and bassist Thundercat a pink kimono to celebrate his birthday on a Los Angeles stage.“Great musicians can make people sound good,” says Glasper. “Especially as a piano player, for many years, I had to perform with singers or horn players who were just horrible. Luckily I don’t have to do that any more. But it teaches you a skillset, it teaches you how to create a situation that elevates. I’m generous on stage because I’m not the full story. I’m a fan of the family I have on stage with me.”This nonstop music-making has earned Glasper 15 Grammy nominations, in almost as many categories: on February 2 next year he’ll find out if he’s won best alternative jazz album, for Code Derivation. Even non-believers have been converted. When Glasper won a Grammy for best R&B album in 2023, Chris Brown, who had also been nominated, posted on Instagram “WHO THE F*CK IS ROBERT GLASPER”. Glasper shrugged off the affront and made it into a T-shirt. Brown looked him up and promptly apologised, writing: “After doing my research I actually think your [sic] amazing.”Most pianists of his calibre start out when they’re toddlers, but Glasper’s first instrument was the drums. He didn’t pick up the piano until later on. He still remembers being allowed to play “Happy Birthday” in church, which he could only do with one finger, when he was 11. This was for congregants at the East Wind Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, where his mother, jazz and gospel singer Kim Yvette Glasper-Dobbs, was musical director.“Once I tapped into it, though, I was off to the races,” he says. “I didn’t have any friends in my neighbourhood. I just stayed home and played the piano.” His mother would go out to gigs saying, “When I come back home, you better be sleeping or on that piano.” Within a few years, he too was musical director at several local churches. Routinely performing in front of a 3,000-strong megachurch meant that when he started performing on stage as an artist, he felt like he’d “been doing it for 20 years already”: “At church, you’re very in tune with the spirit of people and what’s going on, you’re kind of scoring a situation, you have to play something that fits the mood.”From the outset, Glasper refused to heed genre boundaries. When he meshed Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” with Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” for the opener to his 2004 debut, a jazz-trio record titled Mood, he figured purists might balk. Two decades on, he hasn’t only widened listeners’ idea of what jazz can be, he’s reframed the conversation on all that Black music is. On his Black Radio series of albums he’s convened musicians in every category, showcasing his inimitable chord sequences and an ability to write a song almost instantly.Code Derivation is one of the four albums Glasper has released since December 2023, in a deal with Apple. On it, he was finally able to record “Madiba”, a track he wrote in response to being on tour in Johannesburg when Nelson Mandela died. The other albums are a Christmas record, a calming meditation (“people have always said that’s what my music does for them”) and a compilation of live recordings from previous Robtobers. “So many people can’t make it to the residencies. I thought, let me give people around the world a taste of what it is.”Ask Glasper’s collaborators what working with him is like and they all say he is as virtuosic a listener as he is a pianist. Being on stage with him, says the neo-soul maverick Meshell Ndegeocello, “makes us all more buoyant . . . he gives me faith and belief in myself”.More than a bridge, she says, he operates like connective tissue. Watch him on stage, playing different keyboards with each hand, reading the room. He’ll register a sax solo with a thrill of the shoulders, point at the drummer to take over, or signal a problem to the sound engineer, with the same unflappable calm. To the audience, he’ll talk like it’s just the two of you having a drink.Serving his listeners undergirds all of Glasper’s work. He describes himself as “a musical first responder”, always ready “for something miraculous to happen”.“My personality has been the same since I was a little kid,” he says. “My mom had that same personality. My dad has that personality, you know, he just makes everyone in the room feel comfortable and you want to be there. That’s the kind of household I grew up in and I’ve never separated how I am on stage from real life. I’m always going to be the same.”Robert Glasper plays Koko, London, on November 18 and 21, efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk
