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The trio embarks on their own voyage with Glasper’s “Lil’ Tipsy,” using compression-expansion techniques to explore in painstaking detail a disjunctive dance of inebriation. Glasper uses the concluding vamp as a spur-of-the-moment opportunity to segue directly into “Alone Together.” There ensues an avid triologue, Hurst holding down the bottom as Glasper and Reid, with nonchalant confidence, weave through of an obstacle course of rhythmic signatures.

On “Mood,” a quintet track, Moreno and Ellis offer beautiful contrapuntal section playing and pungent solos, capturing the composer’s intent to resolve from a melancholy opening to an impassioned feelgood vamp. Bilal ratchets the intensity on “Don’t Close Your Eyes,” a bluesy jazz ballad to which Glasper wrote the melody and the lyric. Glasper says: “I have a certain feel, a certain way of thinking and imagining of and hearing harmony, and it all descends from coming up in and playing music in the church.”

Glasper returns to ebullience on a creative and virtuosic treatment of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.” There was a detergent commercial that used it during my first year in school,” he relates, “and I was singing all the time. Then someone told me it was a jazz tune. I arranged it for a concert at school. A year later, I came up with this arrangement.“

‘Interlude’ happened because we kept playing after I faded out from the drum solo, and when I listened to the tape I thought the hip-hop part was hot. Hip-hop is a part of me, too, and I wanted to have that influence on the album.”

 “In Passing” began as an elegy for Glasper’s Houston friend, Scooby, who died in 1999. “I never could finish the tune, but I started working on it again when Aliyah died,” Glasper says. “Not too long after that, 9/11 happened. That made me finish the song. It’s about how your time on earth is passing.”

Glasper ends the program with the incendiary “L N K Blues,” setting up a John Ellis-Marcus Strickland tenor battle that implicitly affirms his connection to and extensions of the idiom that defined the sound of jazz in Houston from the ‘40s through the ‘60s.

Personnel:

Robert Glasper (P), Bob Hurst (B), Damion Reid (D)

 Featuring: Bilal (Vcl On Side A #1, Side C #1), Mike Moreno (G On

Side A #2), John Ellis (Ts On Side A #2, Side D #3 1st Solo), Marcus Strickland (Ts On Side D #3 2nd Solo)

Tracklist

 Side A:

Maiden Voyage

Mood

 Side B:

Lil’ Tipsy

Alone Together

 Side C:

Don’t Close Your Eyes  

Blue Skies

 Side D:

Interlude  

In Passing  

L.N.K. Blues

Recorded At Systems Two Recording Studios, Brooklyn, New York, May 17 & 20, 2002