"Double-Booked” - Robert Glasper (Blue Note)

SOUNDS LIKE: Half of the songs are contemporary jazz, half are hip hop and electronica influenced. All very well done.

Pianist Robert has long flirted with hip hop elements in his music. And he’s done a good job of subtly mixing the streetwise musical influence within the more traditional framework of contemporary jazz.

Glasper is a master of subtlety. He doesn’t hit you over the head with a lot of heavy turntable scratching, sampling and looping that other artists seems to do when they mix hip hop and jazz.

His is a well placed scratch here and a voice sample there approach. Sometimes the end of a song provides a segue to the next one. But it’s the brilliance of his piano work and his never boring intellectual compositions that define Glasper’s music. He’s at once Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock an Bill Evans yet he’s molded all those styles into his own contemporary sound.

It’s a sound that’s too cerebral to be called smooth jazz but is just as accessible.

On “Double-Booked,” Glasper presents a bi-polar approach to his music. The first six songs are classic Glasper Trio. It’s the Bill Evans inspired trio work that’s familiar to his fans.

But the last six tunes are what long time fans knew the young piano master was flirting with all along: an all out hip hop fusion experiment.

And the last six songs are performed by the Robert Glasper Experiment, his usual sidemen bassist Vincente Archer and drummer Chris Dave are joined by Mos Def, Bilal, turntablist Jahi Sundance and the Roots.

For all this added firepower it’s still tastefully done. Many of the tracks use a vocoder reminiscent of 1980s Herbie Hancock.

“Double-Booked” may well be the jazz album of the year.