Robert Glasper: “Jazz is the mother of hip-hop” | JAZZ NIGHT IN AMERICA

Why do hip-hop producers gravitate towards jazz samples? ————————————————————— by ALEX ARIFF For a mood, for sonic timbre, for a unique rhythmic component. Swing is a precursor to the boom-bap. “If you’re a hip-hop producer that wants a lot of melodic stuff happening,“ pianist Robert Glasper says, “you’re probably going to go to jazz first.“ Glasper has lived in an area of overlap between jazz and hip-hop for more than two decades — and you can hear it in his piano playing, which often drifts into cyclical rhythms akin to a beat-maker’s loops. It’s all one and the same to Glasper: recasting the music of Miles Davis for an R&B audience or rocking live shows with Q-Tip; playing acoustic jazz with his trio or streamlined soul with his Grammy-winning Robert Glasper Experiment. In this short doc, Glasper identifies three jazz samples, from tracks by Ahmad Jamal and Herbie Hancock, that have served as source material for famed hip-hop produc