The Night Robert Glasper Slipped Radiohead Into Herbie Hancock at the Fondation Louis Vuitton

On the second night of Robert Glasper's Piano Jazz Sessions residency, his trio came out of Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" and, without stopping, drifted into Radiohead's "Everything in Its Right Place." No introduction, no cue to the room that anything unusual was happening. Within days, clips of the moment were moving through Instagram and TikTok, which is not something that typically happens to a classical-adjacent piano series in a museum auditorium in the Bois de Boulogne.

That single transition is worth pulling apart, because it says more about what Glasper does than any bio paragraph could. But it also sits inside two other stories worth knowing: what this residency actually is, and what kind of institution decided to build a jazz series in the first place.

Twenty years of Canvas, back in the room that made it

The two Paris dates, June 26 and 27, marked the sixth edition of the Fondation's Piano Jazz Sessions, and Glasper built the set around the twentieth anniversary of Canvas, his 2005 debut for Blue Note. He played it with the same rhythm section from that record, bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Damion Reid, a trio he rarely tours as a stripped-down unit these days. Most of his visible work over the past decade has come through the Robert Glasper Experiment, film and TV scoring, and a run of high-profile collaborations. Putting the original trio back together for an acoustic set, in front of Herbie Hancock and Brad Mehldau's old room, was as much a statement about where Glasper started as where he's ended up.

Canvas is the record where Glasper's now-familiar instinct first showed up on tape: jazz trio writing that keeps one ear on hip-hop phrasing without turning it into a gimmick. Two decades on, that instinct is still the throughline. The Radiohead cover wasn't a detour from the Canvas material. It's the same move Canvas was built on, aimed at a different generation of songs.

The rest of the set made the same point twice

The Radiohead moment got the clips, but it wasn't the only cover in the room. Glasper's trio also worked through Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," NxWorries' "86Sentra," and, as an encore, A Tribe Called Quest's "Luck of Lucien." Somewhere in the middle of the set, they played D'Angelo's "Lady," dedicated to the singer, who died in October 2025. None of it needed a caption explaining why a jazz trio was covering Nirvana or NxWorries. That's the entire premise of Glasper's career: those songs belong in this room as much as Hancock or Hank Mobley do, and he'd rather prove it than argue it.

What the Fondation actually is, and why a jazz series lives there

The Fondation Louis Vuitton is a private museum in the Bois de Boulogne, funded by LVMH and built to a design by Frank Gehry, its glass "sails" now one of the more photographed silhouettes in Paris. It opened in 2014, and its stated mission, however corporate its funding source, is straightforward: make art and culture accessible to as broad an audience as possible. That mandate covers the exhibition galleries, but it also covers the 350-seat Auditorium downstairs, where the Fondation runs a genuinely eclectic performance calendar alongside its visual art program.

Piano Jazz Sessions is one strand of that calendar, and the guest list tells you what the Fondation thinks the series is for. Herbie Hancock and Brad Mehldau came before Glasper. That's not a random booking pattern. It's a lineage, and putting Glasper in it is a claim that his version of jazz, hip-hop inflected and R&B literate, belongs in the same conversation as Hancock's.

Frank Gehry died in December 2025, at 96, and the Fondation is marking his passing with a tribute concert in the same Auditorium on July 7. The building he designed keeps doing the job he built it to do: putting people in a room with music and art that a lot of institutions would keep in separate wings.

The read

A private museum funded by a luxury conglomerate booking a Grammy-winning jazz pianist to cover Radiohead and Nirvana isn't really a contradiction, even though it looks like one on paper. It's what happens when an institution treats its auditorium as seriously as its galleries, and books artists who refuse to sit still inside a genre. The clip going viral wasn't luck. It was the predictable result of putting a musician who does this constantly in a room built to let him.

The replay of the concert is available via FLV Play and medici.tv, and a video of the Radiohead moment is on YouTube: