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I first heard Robert Glasper when we were both students at Houston's High School for Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) about ten years ago.

Since then, he's gone on to make a name for himself and was the subject of this article in the Washington Post in 2012: "Pianist finds the right notes between hip-hop and jazz".

This article is the source of the quotation that appeared in my post from yesterday ("Glasper, Robert - music in the present"). Here it is in full:

“I think everybody stopped trying to outdo each other and everybody started paying homage,” he says. “I love all my jazz masters and my elders that came before me, but I always say that people have killed the living to praise the dead. It’s like, ‘Yo, I’m here.’”

Reading it in full gave me more food for thought, especially about music in the church.

It's very easy to "pay homage" to all the great music of the past. And in fact I think many music lists of many churches fail to move past the expected and the very familiar.

While the "Yo, I'm here" sentiment has limited value in the liturgy, there is something to be said for forging a way ahead that pays homage to the past but also moves the conversation forward.

Music can't remain static. The repertoire should not remain the same. If the Holy Spirit is still in operation today then fresh voices must be given airtime.

Finding a balance between the established canon and new voices should be a struggle in jazz just as it should be in church music. The two should be held in creative tension.

We in the church can learn a lot from jazz, a form of music whose very being thrives on fast-paced real-time creativity, conversation, and improvisation.

The modern "symphonic" approach to church music, first found in the music of Charles Villiers Stanford and then redefined by Herbert Howells, continues to provide a foundation for much of the sacred music being written now.

So, the ultimate tension is that "paying homage" is itself a way forward.

Labels: Howells, HSPVA, improvisation, Jazz, Robert Glasper, Stanford

It's been a really rough couple weeks for jazz. 

First, poorly conceived satire piece in The New Yorker aimed at an elder statesman. 

It's supposed to be funny, but it's not. At best, it's a poor, confusing joke. At worst, it's racist.

And now someone dismissing the whole genre – not satire – in The Washington Post. 

Thank goodness for this response. 

All what jazz? Or: How to declare something dead without listening to it

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/08/11/all-what-jazz-or-how-to-declare-something-dead-without-listening-to-it/

There's an entire of generation of rising young jazz players wrestling with that perception — and with the idea that jazz music belongs to the past, not the present. Two years ago, the inventive young pianist Robert Glasper told me, "I love all my jazz masters and my elders that came before me, but I always say that people have killed the living to praise the dead."

The refusal to investigate Glapser's world — i.e. the present — is what makes this argument so bothersome. The article dismisses an art that the author is not currently engaged with, tamping his broadside with the disclaimer of simply speaking one's mind. These are "some of my problems," [Justin] Moyer writes. (And Moyer has a fascinating mind — I've known him through the D.C. punk scene since I was a teenager.)

But personal and provocative declarations are what make the Internet hum, and in music journalism, (and everywhere else), the clicks have become more important than the quality of the conversation. So the conversation stays urgent and stupid, preventing a substantive dialogue from ever getting started. A little more brain gets chewed up and spit out.

(via Instapaper)

How many of us musicians have to deal with the "urgent and stupid" conversation about an art form that our critics don't bother to engage with? How many of us really have the courage to? Or the time?

Music must belong in the present. Music of every genre happens in the present. 

We can have better conversations. We must.

Reports of the death of music of all types has been greatly exaggerated.

Labels: HSPVA, Jazz, music, Robert Glasper