(
LA Times) The cavernous dance club in downtown L.A. is hopping, and the weekend is still a day away. The club is ordinarily a hotbed of thumping house music, but tonight, the headliner — Houston-born
jazz pianist and bandleader Robert Glasper — is switching things up.
Behind a bank of keyboards, Glasper leads his quartet through a restless swirl of searching piano melody, causing the crowd to sway under the hazy colored lights. As the song gathers into focus, one musician begins repeating an unmistakable, 40-year-old refrain, his voice shaded by electronics: "A love supreme…. A love supreme…"
This introduction of
John Coltrane (or at least the sounds he inspired) into a modern dance club was a gratifying, chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment, but it isn't a singular event. The night's opener, British
electronic producer and
DJQuantic, made for an easy transition to Glasper, with a live band swerving through funk and soul-jazz.
As both artists expertly blended genres to reach new audiences, their sound pointed to that natural link between jazz and EDM, or electronic
dance music.
With fans turning out by the thousands for sprawling dance festivals in celebration of the beat, it's become clear that lyrics are no longer necessary to pull in a younger crowd.
Simply put, instrumental music is becoming something less exotic. EDM, which is often lyricless or dependent on a vocal loop that serves more as an instrument than a worded sentiment, is now one of the top-grossing genres of the music world.
As fans of
Miles Davis and
Charlie Parker learned before them, listeners drawn to the sounds of DJs such as Tiësto and
Deadmau5 know that lyrics sometimes get in the way of expressing feelings in music. And it bears repeating: Jazz began as dance music.
And with artists such as Quantic and Glasper folding strains of jazz into a mix that sounds natural on the dance floor, there's growing potential for EDM to serve as a gateway drug into jazz.
Shared echoes between electronic music and improvised instrumental music have been building for years, with that shared ground most consistently explored in
Europe. Squarepusher brought fretless, jazz fusion-ready bass to what was unfortunately known as Intelligent Dance Music in the '90s, and London-born electronic musician Kieran Hebden followed in the ...
Andrew Shaw: Starting out together in Chicago, you weren’t originally being signed by managers or engaged by bookers, you were hosting your own homegrown parties, developing your music in a truly independent way: How much of your musical style today stems from the fact that you grew so organically from the very beginning?
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