Ah Yeah (So What)

The "So What" of the title is Miles Davis's — Glasper takes the modal jazz giant's most recognizable opening gambit and folds it into a groove that is unambiguously of the hip-hop era, the Dorian mode that Miles made famous now sitting atop a beat that owes as much to J Dilla as to Kind of Blue. This juxtaposition is the whole argument: that jazz and hip-hop are the same conversation conducted across a temporal gap, that the sensibility of cool, of understatement, of space as an expressive tool, runs continuously from Davis through every great hip-hop producer who understood that what you leave out matters as much as what you put in. Casey Benjamin's vocoder vocals add a contemporary electronic texture, and the rhythm section plays with the looseness that comes from genuinely understanding an idiom rather than approximating it. The emotional register is both confident and playful — this is music that knows what it is and finds that knowledge pleasurable rather than confining. The groove is the point: deep, patient, the kind of feel that rewards sustained attention. Best heard late at night when you have enough quiet around you to notice what the spaces between notes are doing.