Rob Glassman Music

From Motown and R&B to the Grateful Dead

Rob's influences began long before he started fronting his own band. Growing up, he was drawn to R&B, Motown, classic rock, and disco, with shows like American Bandstand, Soul Train, and MTV exposing him to a wide range of music. A major turning point came in high school when he attended his first Grateful Dead concert — an experience that opened the door to the improvisational music scene and led him deeper into Bob Dylan, The Neville Brothers, The Meters, Phish, The Radiators, Widespread Panic, and the Woodstock-era artists.

The Dead also led Rob toward jazz. Hearing saxophonist Branford Marsalis perform with the band encouraged him to explore Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Stanley Turrentine, David Sanborn, and Ornette Coleman — a wide-ranging curiosity that eventually became part of the sound he brings to his own shows.

Starting with Rhythm

Rob's path as a performer actually began with percussion rather than guitar. Inspired by Grateful Dead drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, he started experimenting with percussion in the late 1980s, and after returning from a period living in Maui in 1991, expanded his setup and began sitting in with blues bands around New Haven through the 1990s. By the late '90s he'd taken up guitar in earnest, largely self-taught with help from musician friends — eventually leading him to form a band, write original material, and perform regularly throughout the region.

The Rob Glassman Band — RGB

Today, RGB is best described as a high-energy classic rock jam band built around improvisation and musical freedom. Rather than treating every song as an isolated performance, RGB frequently lets one tune flow into another, mixing recognizable songs with extended jams and spontaneous interaction. The Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band catalog are important parts of the repertoire, but they don't define everything the band plays — RGB draws from a much broader range of rock, blues, R&B, funk, and jam-oriented music, plus Rob's own original songs.

Original Music & Notable Collaborators

Rob has performed or shared the stage with an impressive range of musicians over the years:

Steal Your Funk with Jen Durkin

Rob's musical life extends beyond RGB. He's also a co-founder, percussionist, and vocalist with Jen Durkin's Steal Your Funk, a project he created with Durkin and keyboardist Jordan Giangreco in 2015, bringing together funk, Motown, disco, R&B, dance music, and the music of the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band — another improvisation-heavy project built around groove and audience energy.

Music Built Around the Live Experience

For all the influences, collaborations, and configurations, the common thread through Rob Glassman Music is the live experience. Rob's approach is less about reproducing songs note-for-note and more about creating a performance with room to move — songs can stretch, musicians can react to one another, and familiar material can head somewhere unexpected. That philosophy makes RGB a natural fit for Connecticut's live-music scene, whether appearing as an intimate acoustic group or a full electric jam band.