Robert Glasper is striding through the middle of New York when the Straight reaches him. The sound of the world’s most energetically cosmopolitan city is present in the background, which has some bearing on matters. Glasper has noted that his hip-hop education coincided with his move to the Big Apple to attend the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in the early ’90s, and he’s touted for folding that urban influence into his style.

It’s brought him into creative contact with the likes of Kanye West and Erykah Badu, but behind all that is the church music he played in his youth, and the towering influence of his mom. “She was a jazz singer, an R & B singer, and a gospel singer,” he says. “That’s why I’m a musical mutt, because she was. I would walk in the house and she’d be playing Ella Fitzgerald, and Oscar Peterson, and all kinds of things.”

Glasper’s a strange beast, splitting his time—and the 2009 Blue Note album Double Booked—between an outfit called Experiment and another called the Trio. He lets rip with collaborators like Mos Def and turntablist Jahi Sundance in the former. Meanwhile, the acoustic Trio sizzles with postbop precision, improvisation, and an ever-present lust for melody—as on signature tracks like “Yes I’m Country (and That’s OK)”. Glasper feels the two poles are not actually so far apart.

“Well, my trio automatically has that vibe,” he says. “It has hip-hop influence, and other musical influences, and that’s what Experiment was born from. It was like, ”˜You know what? Just let me do a band that just does these things, versus the piano trio where you go in and out of the regular piano trio vibe.’ But my Trio had that first, before Experiment was even born.”

Asked if the genre divisions ostensibly separating his two projects will exist in the future, Glasper shoots back: “I don’t think they’re gonna mean much at all.” But he also acknowledges, in the present, that some people are challenged by his habitual crossbreeding.

“Whenever you’re doing something that’s not the norm, you’re gonna get flak,” he says. “[But] jazz is one of those things that’s always living, and breathing, and moving, so it’s never gonna be the same. If you’re one of them people who say ”˜This is what jazz is,’ or ”˜That’s not jazz,’ then you’re not even lining up with the actual meaning of the word.”

The Robert Glasper Trio plays Performance Works on June 25.