Robert M May

“My whole career, everybody’s been saying my music is meditative,” Robert Glasper tells Apple Music. “People say they study to my music, they pray to my music, they do yoga to my music, they just zone out. People have wanted me to do this for a long time.” The Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer is talking about the direction of his latest album Let Go, a project he created in partnership with Apple Music with the express intention of helping listeners recalibrate mentally. “I wouldn't call it the ‘meditation project’ or nothing like that,” Glasper says.

Of all Robert Cray albums, over a career that has now spanned 20 years, this is the one I keep coming back to time and time again. I Was Warned is not one of Robert Cray's more critically acclaimed or commercially successful albums, yet for me it's a handsome, undemanding record that is full of great songs and superb playing. As a practitioner of the blues, Cray has been instrumental in it's re-emergence as a popular art-form in the 80's and 90's, however he has never considered himself to be a 'bluesman' - preferring to call his sound a blues/soul/rock hybrid. I Was Warned tends towards soul and rock. There is a definite feel-good factor to 'Just A Loser' and 'I'm A Good Man', both carry an irresistable groove and Cray clearly revels in his everyman tales of love and life. 'The Price I Pay' is a meditation on fading love, it is one of Cray's finest ballads - a side of his music that seems to get overlooked. 'On The Road Down' is blisteringly good also and showcases some fine guitar-work.

“My whole career, everybody’s been saying my music is meditative,” Robert Glasper tells Apple Music. “People say they study to my music, they pray to my music, they do yoga to my music, they just zone out. People have wanted me to do this for a long time.” The Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer is talking about the direction of his latest album Let Go, a project he created in partnership with Apple Music with the express intention of helping listeners recalibrate mentally. “I wouldn't call it the ‘meditation project’ or nothing like that,” Glasper says.

Four months after winning his second Grammy Award in the R&B category for Black Radio 2, pianist Robert Glasper re-assembles the acoustic jazz trio that played on his first two Blue Note recordings…