No words, just music

Wearing a face shield, DJ Squarepusher performs at the Hard Summer Music Festival in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES - The cavernous dance club in downtown L.A. is hopping, and the weekend is still a day away. The club is ordinarily a hotbed of thumping house music, but tonight, the headliner - Houston-born jazz pianist and bandleader Robert Glasper - is switching things up.

Behind a bank of keyboards, Glasper leads his quartet through a restless swirl of searching piano melody, causing the crowd to sway under the hazy colored lights. As the song gathers into focus, one musician begins repeating an unmistakable, 40-year-old refrain, his voice shaded by electronics: "A love supreme . . . A love supreme . . . "

This introduction of John Coltrane (or at least the sounds he inspired) into a modern dance club was a gratifying, chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment, but it isn't a singular event.

The night's opener, British electronic producer and DJ Quantic, made for an easy transition to Glasper, with a live band swerving through funk and soul-jazz.

As both artists expertly blended genres to reach new audiences, their sound pointed to that natural link between jazz and EDM, or electronic dance music.

With fans turning out by the thousands for sprawling dance festivals in celebration of the beat, it's become clear that lyrics are no longer necessary to pull in a younger crowd.

Simply put, instrumental music is becoming something less exotic. EDM, which is often lyricless or dependent on a vocal loop that serves more as an instrument than a worded sentiment, is now one of the top-grossing genres of the music world.

As fans of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker learned before them, listeners drawn to the sounds of DJs such as Tiesto and Deadmau5 know that lyrics sometimes get in the way of expressing feelings in music. And it bears repeating: Jazz began as dance music.

And with artists such as Quantic and Glasper folding strains of jazz into a mix that sounds natural on the dance floor, there's growing potential for EDM to serve as a gateway drug into jazz.

Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/20120829_No_words__just_music.html#ixzz24vpC9mjl

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