Robert Glasper's 2019 seemed comparatively inactive release-wise -- amounting to the co-production of
Philip Bailey's
Love Will Find a Way and smaller roles on
Shafiq Husayn's
The Loop,
Tank and the Bangas'
Green Balloon,
Flying Lotus'
Flamagra, and
Brittany Howard's
Jaime -- until the keyboardist offloaded
Fuck Yo Feelings. What started as a session booked for the leader with drummer
Chris Dave, bassist
Derrick Hodge, and turntablist
Jahi Sundance developed into something far more communal and experimental than any of the quartet's
Robert Glasper Experiment recordings. Dozens of instrumentalists and vocalists took part, and in extemporaneous fashion helped
Glasper create this willfully diffuse mixtape of oblique incidental instrumentals and full-blown songs that vary wildly in style and sentiment. Forget flow. It's introduced with a vulgar roast and peppered with other comic banter and humorously processed pronouncements. A floating seven-minute ballad of longing with the sighing voices of
Bridget Kelly,
SiR, and
Song Bird is inserted between two of the set's most cutting tracks, powered by
Rapsody,
Baby Rose, and
Queen Sheba. A gospel-fusion wriggler begins to sputter halfway through to set up the title song, a tipsily elegant scolding from
Yebba. What sounds like a simmering work in progress with
Mick Jenkins is placed early in the set, while a fully formed
Yasiin Bey collaboration is slotted toward the end, trailing a sequence of wayward noodlings. It peaks around the middle with "Endangered Black Woman," where
Glasper and company place a twisting and turning groove beneath vocals from
Andra Day (in casually assertive
Erykah Badu mode) and poet
Staceyann Chin (who is furious and commanding). The outgrowth of
Fuck Yo Feelings -- its making must have forged new artistic bonds -- could be of greater import. The defiant group chorus on "This Changes Everything" alone is proof that it had to happen. ~ Andy Kellman
![Pharoah [Expanded Edition]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0680899800815_p0_v2_s90x140.jpg "Pharoah [Expanded Edition]")
![Schizophrenia [Blue Note Tone Poet Series]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0602448498533_p0_v2_s90x140.jpg "Schizophrenia [Blue Note Tone Poet Series]")
