The Atlanta Jazz Festival and Featured Artist: Robert Glasper Experiment

Aside from taking time to reflect on the meaning of Memorial Day, my Memorial Day weekend was rather eventful. I attended the 35th annual Atlanta Jazz Festival in Piedmont Park and had the pleasure of hearing featured artist, the Robert Glasper Experiment.

Noted as one of the country’s largest free music festivals, the Atlanta Jazz Festival is a three-day event spanned over the Memorial Day weekend that features established and up-and-coming jazz musicians. Musical acts that graced the stage included flutist, Dwight Andrews, Tito Puente Jr. and Orchestra, and Kathleen Bertrand.

The standout performance of the night was the Robert Glasper Experiment. With a musical sound infused with jazz, R&B, hip-hop, and rock, the Robert Glasper Experiment did not disappoint. During the four man group’s performance, they covered popular songs “Cherish the Day” by Sade’, Musiq Soulchild’s “Don’t Change”, and Floetry’s “Say Yes” before performing singles from their latest project, Black 
Radio.

Jazz pianist, Robert Glasper has worked with some of the best in the world of R&B and hip-hop. He has worked with Jay-Z, Erykah Badu, and Bilal and yasiin bey (Mos Def), as musical director. He was also featured on Kanye West’s Late Registration, Q-Tip’s The Renaissance, and in 2009, toured exclusively on Maxwell’s BLACKsummers’night tour.

With four albums under his belt, Robert Glasper released the first full-length album with his Experiment band in February. The album, entitled, Black Radio, was named and inspired by an aircraft’s black box—it holds the truth and is indestructible. The cover of Sade’s “Cherish the Day” featuring Lalah Hathaway leave listeners wanting more from the sultry-voiced songstress and tracks featuring Me’Shell Ndegeocello and Ledisi exhibits how well the Experiment meshes R&B and jazz together. If you are looking for an album to satisfy both R&B and jazz needs, Black Radio is a mélange of jazz and R&B sure to satisfy the music lover’s palate. 

Coachella and the Use of Social Media

While everyone is still buzzing about the Tupac hologram feature at this year's Coachella music festival, I am intrigued with the way they have included social media as a large part of the festival. Unfortunately, I could not attend the festival but I noticed a lot of buzz about it via social networking sites, Facebook and Twitter.

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Instagram made it easy for concert promoters to promote the festival and made it easy and fun for concert attendees to chronicle their adventures.

One of the ways social media networks were used to connect fans to the festival was through Facebook. With over 30,000 attendees, Coachella used technology that allowed concertgoers the chance to automatically update their Facebook status at several checkpoints with where they were and what they were doing.  Coachella attendees were given wristbands that were implanted with radio-frequency identification or RFID.  RFID uses electromagnetic fields to transmit data from one object to another—mainly used for tracking and automatic identification.  The Coachella music festival already has a large following, but due to the launch of the wristbands, its online audience was increased tremendously.

The annual music and arts festival allowed concertgoers to create a phone app that customized their concert schedule as well as create memorabilia they could tag to sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Festival attendees also used social media sites Foursquare, GroupMe, Tumblr, You Tube and Pinterest to access information and share their experiences to friends near and far.

 Social media has allowed people a chance to go places they have never been before, see things they could never imagine, and hear things from around the world.  I can only imagine how much the live performance industry will change in the future.

What are your thoughts?