Ronnie Scott's, London
Last November, young American pianist Robert Glasper managed to boil down much of the eclectic and improvisatory spirit of the London jazz festival into a single concert. The gig was primarily a vehicle for the pianist's cutting-edge jazz trio, which has just returned to London to play one of four nights on a sold-out Glasper season at Ronnie Scott's ? with the other three showcasing a Glasper electric quartet (featuring the remarkable saxophonist and vocoder-singer Casey Benjamin) that shifts with casual precision between cool, open-improv saunters, spine-tingling outbursts of hard funk, and eerie soul-singing dreamwalks processed by the tone-bending electronics. The four-night run is thus as a live approximation of the genre-colliding repertoire of Glasper's innovative 2009 album, Double Booked.
On Wednesday, the quartet offhandedly came together following bass guitarist Derrick Hodge's elastically funky solo occupancy of the stage, with the leader starting to hint at a groove from the acoustic piano, and Benjamin squeezing fragments of soprano-sax figures with a Wayne Shorter-like whimsicality. Glasper regular Chris Dave, one of the world's great contemporary jazz drummers, began to stab and splash percussion patterns into the mix, as the group sound intensified. Dave's rattlesnake snare-drum figures then contrasted sharply with Glasper's more conventionally jazzy piano ruminations, which grew heated in a McCoy Tynerish manner, then liquid and sensuous as the pianist switched to electric keys. Twisting bop-like melodies erupted over fierce free-funk, with Glasper swapping acoustic and electric instruments, Herbie Hancock's Come Running to Me was a vocoder wail over slashing cymbal patterns, before Glasper slipped in My Favourite Things to confirm how naturally the jazz tradition and the present coexist in him. It's not surprising Robert Glasper gets feted as a true inheritor of the all-comers musicality and freewheeling skills of Herbie Hancock.
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