Review | Jazz-Lined Groove Machine, Subject to Change

Jazz may be the essential home turf and primary genre identifier for Robert Glasper, but the keyboardist/leader/concept man has carved out his own vision and game plan for how he fits within that culture. When Glasper made his Santa Barbara debut at the Lobero Theatre last Saturday night, the 47-year-old Houston native and his nimble trio of bandmates laid out Glasper’s special vision and musical agenda over the course of a jammy, structurally loose but conceptually strong 90-minute set.

Glasper’s secret recipe/agenda has evolved over the years through his “black radio” concept, dating back to the acclaimed Black Radio album in 2012, up through 2023’s Black Radio III (the ostensible source of the current tour). The plan involves generous but non-traditional bolts of R&B and hip-hop grooves, elastic improv sections between taut structural fixtures, and ambient sonic nuggets. 

Never mind the conventional jazz tradition of tunes played in predictable melody-solo-melody format; Glasper is more interested in creating a musical space and implied storyline on an album or in concert. His music is akin to the atmospheric goal behind what Spike Lee calls his films — “joints.”

At the Lobero, in a Jill Newman Productions-sponsored gig, Glasper and company — solid bassist Burniss Travis, awesome-sauced young drummer Justin Tyson, and deejay Jahi Sundance — sauntered on stage and eased into a hypnotic set. Vocals wove into the palette, in subtle fashion, via Glasper’s understated singing style and sampled female vocals flown in from Sundance’s digital command post. 

Opening with a fine example of Glasper’s soulful expertise on the classic Rhodes electric piano, on the theme of Herbie Hancock’s “Tell Me a Bedtime Story,” the set wove through various pieces and moodscapes, even including a singalong snippet of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” and closed out on a feisty and fusion-y note, as Glasper got lost in an intense, serpentine synth solo. Abruptly, Glasper exited stage left, quickly reintroducing his bandmates and sauntering off into the night. 

Glasper’s free-spirited format even allows for pauses that refresh during a show. One such moment came in the libero set, when the leader paused to strike up a joint (different kind of “joint” than what Spike Lee was referring to) and then passed it around. Sundance quipped, “This is some good shit. Did you get it here?” Glasper didn’t miss a beat: “Absolutely. Santa Barbara special.”

Seriously, though, Glasper’s musical and technical credentials are well in order, despite the intentionally limited harmonic vocabulary of his new soul jazz aesthetic. He embarked on an inventive, and Thelonious Monk–ish reconsideration of the jazz standard “Stella by Starlight,” giving it a fresh coat of interpretive paint, and later summoned up a rhythmically complex vamp that then morphed into Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place.” 

And on this night, everything was in its right place, according to the ever-flexible mandates of Glasper’s musical mind. The sum effect of the concert, as a whole, was that those of us in the audience felt like we were dropping into a story very much in progress, without the usual tidy guideposts of discrete songs or other standard concert trappings. Call it jazz-mindedness as holistic practice, in Glasper-ian groove mode.