Robert Glasper
Covered
(Blue Note)

THE dedicatees of the Houston-born pianist Robert Glasper’s new album Covered will never hear its power and beauty.

They are those who have been killed by police and their cohorts in the US, all those whose names have been kept alive by the incessant resistance and love of their families, friends and millions of other US citizens demonstrating and marching through the streets of their cities, outside courthouses and police stations in the very faces of those who have misrepresented and abused the laws of their land.

It is not until the final track of Glasper’s album, called I’m Dying of Thirst, that his dedication becomes fully explicit, when a group of children recite the names of the victims, many of them, from Trayvon Martin of Florida to Michael Brown of Ferguson to Eric Garner of New York beside Glasper’s softly comping piano, Damion Reid’s clipping drums and Vicente Archer’s delving bass, and one boy delivers the communal message of pride and happiness in selfhood beyond colour. The words resonate alongside the music, and cross an ocean too.

Covered was recorded live in December 2014 in a Hollywood studio with a warm and receptive audience.

Reid and Archer make up the same longtime trio on Glasper’s first two Blue Note albums (Canvas 2005 and In My Element 2006) and the threesome play with an intimate understanding of, and empathy with, the subtleties and unique ways of each other’s music.

As soon as Glasper moves into I Don’t Even Care, what immediately impresses, unusually from a pianist with strong hip-hop connections, is the compelling lightness of his touch on the keys, as if his piano ancestry goes back to Teddy Wilson or Tommy Flanagan, although the repeated rhythmic and percussive sound of his notes also remind you of the pianism of Mal Waldron — an attachment which becomes more and more apparent as he plays Reckoner.

His notes in Barangrill pulsate and tingle beside Reid’s cymbalism and Archer’s dancing beat, and during the 13 minutes of In Case You Forgot his sound gains force and sharpness as he begins to address the song’s melody between pounding interpolations supported by Reid’s ever-inventive drums. When Archer comes pulsing in, his relentless throb only thickens the heartsound.

So Beautiful is a melodic love song, softly and wistfully played, Glasper’s notes finding kindship with the quietude of Musiq Soulchild’s chanted vocal.

Through The Worst he strikes his keys harder, making communion with Reid’s drums and chiming almost bell-like in his long, searching chorus.

On to the only standard in the album, the familiar theme of Stella by Starlight recorded by a host of jazz pianists. Glasper plays it like no other, with short, jerking phrases of improvisation on the very cusp of the melody, which comes and goes like a sonic ghost almost between the bristles of Reid’s flickering brushes.

As the album moves towards its close, there is one astonishing track simply called Got Over, albeit a bare two minutes long.

Glasper joins with 88-year-old Harry Belafonte, who talks softly and huskily about his life in Harlem, in Jamaica, in Harlem again — always in discovery and struggle, while the trio, nearly six decades younger, listen and play softly with him.

“I am one of the ones of colour who got over,” he declares, “one of the ones the bullets missed. I’m dyslexic, the son of immigrants from an island of slaves who endured.”

So when immediately after the children, 80 years his juniors, read out the names of those who the bullets didn’t miss, it is especially moving and becomes a stark, chilling commentary of now times.

For people such as I, who remember Belafonte offering us in 1956 our first inkling of Caribbean working lives in The Banana Boat Song, and also also remember his activism all through the civil rights era, his campaigning against apartheid and his excoriation of the warmonger Bush and those he named as the president’s house slaves — Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, who, he said, “are serving those who continue to design our oppression,” we have the feeling that his life has been with us all our lives.

Three generations of resistance come together on this record, a remarkable young Texan pianist generating truth in the present and hope in the future.