Robert Glasper - Double Booked

Remastered and reissued as part of Blue Note's 75th Anniversary Campaign

Blue Note — along with Universal Music Enterprises — is launching a major 75th Anniversary Vinyl Initiative dedicated to the proposition that its catalog should be readily available at a low cost — featuring high quality pressings and authentic reproductions of Blue Note's iconic packaging. Double Booked is reissued here as part of the the vinyl reissue campaign spearheaded by current Blue Note Records President, Don Was.

Robert Glasper is a man of many talents. Certainly, he's both an inarguably accomplished jazz pianist and a first-rate composer. But what Glasper does best is pick drummers. With 2007's In My Element, he provided Damion Reid with a platform to record nothing less than the drum performance of the year. For his Grammy-nominated 2009 effort, Double Booked, Glasper teams up with Chris Dave, and the results are astonishing. It's a concept album, sort of. The first half features the Trio (Glasper, Dave, and bassist Vicente Archer) on a handful of originals and a take on Thelonius Monk's "Think of One."

Double Booked bridges Glasper's parallel careers as the leader of an acclaimed jazz trio and a first-call sideman with hip-hop artists such as Mos Def, Q-Tip and The Roots. Moving nimbly from the acoustic Robert Glasper Trio to the hip-hop fusion Robert Glasper Experiment, the young keyboardist puts his versatility front and center. Special guests on the album include vocalist Bilal and rapper Mos Def.

The Experiment's five tracks differ in texture and depth from the Trio's set, but the adventurousness of the performances and the gorgeous lyricism of Dave's drumming fuse the album's halves into a single musical statement that makes for a great jazz album.