The dark-horse winner for best R&B album at this year’s Grammy Awards was “Black Radio,†a genre-blending, guest-laden effort by the Robert Glasper Experiment. Now Blue Note Records says that a sequel, “Black Radio 2,†will be released on Oct. 29, with a new batch of songs and a new slew of special guests.
Once again the album will feature the Robert Glasper Experiment as a sort of house band, with Mr. Glasper â€" a pianist of roughly equal stature in modern jazz, hip-hop and R&B â€" steering the ship. Among the vocalists featured are the rappers Snoop Dogg, Common and Lupe Fiasco; Patrick Stump, lead singer of the pop-punk band Fall Out Boy; and Norah Jones, who like Mr. Glasper is the product of an acclaimed performing-arts high school in Texas. (They have worked together before, on a 2009 Q-Tip album.)
But the bulk of the album’s singers have a decisive foothold in R&B and soul. Among them are Jill Scott, Brandy, Anthony Hamilton, Faith Evans, Emile Sandé, Dwele, Marsha Ambrosius and Luke James. In a departure from “Black Radio,†which was dominated by cover songs, “Black Radio 2†will consist almost entirely of originals. (Lalah Hathaway sings the lone cover, Stevie Wonder’s “Jesus Children of America,†which also includes a spoken-word tribute to the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, performed by the former child actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner.)
The Robert Glasper Experiment.Mr. Glasper has largely been celebrated for closing a gap between jazz and R&B, and in some sense he carries the standard that other artists have begun to carry forward. On Tuesday Blue Note will release “Live Today,†the debut album by the bassist Derrick Hodge. Among the label’s other recent jazz-meets-soul titles is “No Beginning No End,†an album by the singer José James on which Mr. Glasper played some piano.
One small bit of uncertainty around “Black Radio 2†is the potential effect of a personnel change. “Black Radio†featured Mr. Glasper, Mr. Hodge, Casey Benjamin on vocoder and alto saxophone and Chris Dave on drums. But the drummer on the new album is Mark Colenburg, who has toured with the band. (Mr. Dave, one of the virtuoso rhythm scientists in popular music, recently released a mixtape by his own group, the Drumhedz. He has also kept busy working with D’Angelo.)
Another, more slippery question is whether the self-righteous convictions behind “Black Radio†can resonate the same way this time around. “Thank you for allowing us to play real music,†Mr. Glasper said in his Grammy acceptance speech. It appears that Mr. Hamilton, one of his fellow nominees, took no offense at this; it’s anyone’s guess whether R. Kelly did. But if you interpret “real music†as code for a rigid set of rules, then Mr. Glasper’s efforts start to seem less like a bridging of worlds than a closing of ranks. Given his collaborative history, it’s best to give him the benefit of the doubt.
