With last year’s Covered, free-thinking idiom-bender Robert Glasper imaginatively used a classic acoustic-trio jazz lineup to rework pop-structured songs. ArtScience reassembles his vocoder-dominated Experiment quartet, but this time with all the members joining the electronically massaged vocals in a recalibration of the group’s balance of pop, dance and jazz methods. The fast jazz swing, skidding avant-bop sax and acoustic walking bass of the opener immediately flags that up, before electronically warped crowd sounds and a hard-struck hip-hop groove intervene. Anthemic pop-hooked songs, such as saxist Casey Benjamin’s Day to Day, nonetheless hide sly jazz nuances in the pianist’s casual fills and drummer Mark Colenburg’s eerily impassive snare hits. A cover of Human League’s Human gracefully develops the pop ballad theme as a seductive accumulation of whistling synth sounds and intensifying hip-hop patterns before Benjamin’s soulfully beboppish acoustic-sax finale. Glasper has signalled an impatience with jazz on earlier Experiment ventures, but very definitely not on this one.
