The subtle yet fragmented breaks in "The Consequences of Jealousy," combined with Glasper's right-handed, upper-register chord creations, give Me'Shell Ndégeocello's vocal room to step outside the frame to fully inhabit the brooding musical simmer as an improviser.
"Ah Yeah," with Musiq (Soulchild) and Chrisette Michele, is a sensual babymaker that expands the reach of contemporary jazz. King dreamily croons through "Move Love," as the Experiment pushes the time accents to a near breaking point. "Gonna Be Alright" is a re-imagining of Glasper's "F.T.B." with new lyrics and a rousing, elegant vocal by Ledisi. The band stretches conventional 4/4 time, and the piano and synth shapeshift through the melody, adding depth and musical drama. On "Always Shine," Lupe Fiasco's flow meets Bilal's emotive modern soul. Lalah Hathaway's gorgeous vocal on Sade's "Cherish the Day" finds the rhythm section bumping around the fringes and creating a new pocket, which she embraces while finding spaces inside the song that weren't there before.
Benjamin's airy flute and Glasper's Rhodes and piano converge in the center Hodge's bass adds slip for the drum kit. Sa-Ra's Shafiq Husayn introduces it with "Lift Off." Erykah Badu takes the Cuban jazz classic "Afro Blue" and extends it using hip-hop rhythms and neo-soul groove wedded to her signature, jazz-tinged croon. The various elements yield the desired result: making the whole greater than its parts. The album is a seamless, deeply focused meld of jazz, hip-hop, adult contemporary R&B, neo-soul, even rock, with an expansive use of rhythmic and melodic invention all of it surrounded by spacious, natural-sounding production that's smooth, never slick. She defines Black Radio as "representative of the veracity of Black music" which has been ".emulated, envied and countlessly re-imagined by the rest of the world." With jazz as its backbone, Glasper, drummer Chris Dave, bassist Derrick Hodge, and Casey Benjamin on reeds, winds, and vocoder, cued by the inspiration of black music's illustrious cultural past, try to carve out a creative place for its future. There's the dictionary's definition: "the device in an aircraft that records technical data during a flight, used in case of accident to discover its cause." And there's Angelika Beener's in her liner essay. Black Radio, the title of the Robert Glasper Experiment's proper Blue Note debut, is a double signifier.
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