SOUNDTRACK: ROBERT GLASPER EXPERIMENT-Tiny Desk Concert #332 (January 20, 2014).
I am unfamiliar with Robert Glasper, but he is a whirlwind on the keyboard and a n excellent improviser. He’s also pretty funny. Before the show starts he made a few jokes including picking up a nearby phone and whispering that they were about to do a concert.
The band plays three songs. I hated the first one, but really enjoyed the second two.
Glasper is classified as neo-soul or R&B. He typically has a core band and many guests. The first song is “Trust” which features Marsha Ambrosius on vocals and it is everything I dislike in R&B. While she has a lovely voice, she does all kinds of trills and vibratos and frippery that turns the 6 minute song into an endless excursion (although everyone else in the room loves it, so it’s obviously just me).
The other two songs are instrumental and fare much better.
The first is called “NPR Tiny Desk Jam (Part 1)” and is an improvised piece. He talks to the other guys and they agree to “Make up something funner than playing something we know.” I love the bass sound on this song. And for much of it bassist Derrick Hodge, is playing the main part (Hodge has his own albums out too). When Glasper throws in the little splashes of keys they work really well too. And the drummer Mark Colenburg, is doing some amazing things with just a snare drum and some bells. It’s a great 7 minute jam.
The final song”F.T.B. (Gonna Be Alright)” is one that he has done as an instrumental and with vocals. Thankfully this version is instrumental. Although after the opening notes he sings “hey, yeah” which makes the rest of the band laugh and stop. As the song starts off, much to Bob Boilen’s delight, Glasper grabs the Tiny Desk gong and the drummer uses it in the song. It’s another good jazzy song with some more excellent bass playing. I might wind up calling this the Derrick Hodge Experiment instead.
[READ: July 6, 2016] “Seeing Double”
The May 16, 2016 issue of the New Yorker had a series called “Univent This” in which six authors imagine something that they could make go away. Since I knew many of them, I decided to write about them all. I have to wonder how much these writers had to think about their answers, or if they’d imagined this all along.
This uninvent essay is about mirrors. I enjoyed the opening of the essay in which Kleeman talks about the superstitions behind mirrors–things I didn’t really know about. A Victorian superstition claims that a mirror captures a portion of one’s soul, which is why breaking a mirror is bad luck–it injures the soul.
And after someone died, mirrors were covered to prevent the soul from becoming trapped.
But Kleeman is more concerned with the surface level engagement we have now because of mirrors.
Kleeman maintains that mirrors have made us more likely to look at ourselves as objects “at the expense of caring for ourselves as whole brings.”
There is some truth to this, but I feel like she is taking this to an extreme. While it’s true that mirrors are so cheap and affordable that they are unavoidable, the penultimate paragraph seems a bit overwrought:
whats whole becomes fractured: a series of variants [of yourself] is generated, some better than you had imagined, others worse, all converging in an impulse to control what we see reflected through a more effortful arrangement of the hair body and face…. Does the fascination of glimpsing ourselves outweigh the psychological strain of continually caching, processing, and relating these different likenesses?
While yes, it would be nice to be less concerned with how we look, one needn’t have an existential crisis because there’s a mirror in every room.
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