Glasper, Kahn to Teach Course on Miles Davis at New York University

By DownBeat I Apr. 5, 2016

Robert Glasper (pictured) will partner with journalist Ashley Kahn to teach a course on Miles Davis at New York University in September (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)
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Grammy Award-winning keyboardist Robert Glasper and journalist Ashley Kahn will teach a course on the music and legacy of Miles Davis this fall at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

The course, which will be open to a select number of undergraduates, will analyze the trumpeter’s impact on music through a variety of styles, including jazz, rock, hip-hop, electronic, dance and neo-soul, using Davis’ more than six decades of recordings as source material.

While this class marks Glasper’s first foray into teaching at the university level, Kahn has been with the Clive Davis Institute since 2005. Both Glasper and Kahn have significant connections with Davis’ musical accomplishments—Kahn is author of the 2007 book Kind of Blue: The Making Of The Miles Davis Masterpiece (Da Capo), and Glasper is music supervisor for Miles Ahead, the recent feature-length biopic starring Don Cheadle as Miles Davis.

Glasper will release a Miles Davis tribute album titled Everything’s Beautiful on Columbia/Legacy on May 27.

“It is such an honor to be teaching at the Clive Davis Institute at NYU,” Glasper said in a statement on the university’s website. “I am really excited about this subject—the music of Miles Davis! This is gonna be an incredible journey and I can’t wait to get started.”

In the same statement, Kahn acknowledged the broad musical influence Davis had on his contemporaries, as well as on future generations of musicians in pop, jazz rock and hip-hop.

“Every aspiring performer, producer, songwriter, composer and creative entrepreneur searching for success in today’s popular music industry can learn from the genius of Miles,” said Kahn. ”Some of the greatest pop musicians of the last 50 years, from Joni Mitchell to Fela Kuti to D’Angelo, have enriched their music by engaging with the profound musical innovations that Miles helped bring to the fore.”

Kahn and Glasper’s class will begin at NYU on Sept. 6. For more information on this class and other programs at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, click here.

—Brian Zimmerman