Passing the torch
2/22/2019 12AM
Blind since childhood, Marcus Roberts first gained attention in Wynton Marsalis' ensemble before building his own reputation as a composer and bandleader. His Modern Jazz Generation ensemble combines his regular trio with a horn section of up-and-coming players. (Photo by John Douglas)
Pianist Marcus Roberts schools young colleagues on the roots of jazz
By Scott Hall
Great music depends on real communication, Marcus Roberts says – communication among musicians, communication between performer and audience – and it carries a lesson we can apply to our harried lives in the digital age.
“Things move very fast, and there’s a lot of data, people texting back and forth,” says the jazz pianist and composer, who rose to national attention in Wynton Marsalis’ 1980s ensemble. “In my opinion, we’re actually communicating less with each other. We’re throwing a lot of meaningless details around, and we’re losing touch with the foundation of communication, which is taking the time to think about what someone’s saying to you, think about what they mean to you, think about what it is that you’re actually, long-range, wanting to achieve with them. …
“If a band plays, if it’s a real band, you see a constant conversation going on, where everybody’s getting to express their thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and what they actually know, and their individual power as a musician. But they have to put it inside of a shared agenda where you make room for everyone involved to do that.”
That’s the spirit Roberts tries to maintain in his trio with drummer Jason Marsalis and bassist Rodney Jordan, and in his extended ensemble, the Modern Jazz Generation, which performs May 4 at the Palladium. The larger group adds several brass and wind players, most of them 20-something alumni of Florida State University, where Roberts studied and now teaches.
Mentoring younger players is central to Roberts’ work and a way to recognize the support he has received through the years from his family, teachers, church community and other musicians. Growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, Roberts began losing his vision to glaucoma and cataracts at age 5. He taught himself piano, with no formal instruction until age 12, and he learned braille at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, also the alma mater of Ray Charles.
“I always said that if I was ever successful doing it, I would always try to help young men and women who want to play, and try not to base it exclusively on their talent level,” he says. “That’s really why this band exists.”
Aside from his personal story, Roberts says multigenerational collaboration is vital to the history and future of jazz itself.
“August Wilson (the late playwright) told me that to carry on any tradition, you need three generations of people communicating about it. It takes two generations to raise the next generation. And I never forgot that,” he says. “If you’ve got three generations connected, you can cover a wide range of years that are relevant to all of those generations, and they help each other figure out how to use the information that was figured out by the people who are doing the mentoring. But even the folks that you’re mentoring, the young people, they do bring a lot of energy, and their understanding of technology, and their love of the music that they grew up listening to. … We need them, and they need us, and I think that authentic relationship is what people like to see. With this particular group, it’s a band, but it’s really something a lot deeper – it’s really a community.”
Key to that interaction is an appreciation for the pioneers and the traditions of jazz. As an associate of the Marsalis family, Roberts is often lumped into the so-called neo-bop or neoclassical wave of players who rejected electric fusion and avant-garde free jazz in favor of the swing, syncopation, harmony and melody of earlier eras. They were criticized in some circles for taking the music “backwards.”
“For some reason, in jazz music there is this weird sense that if you study great achievements, that’s actually going to stop you from being great. It’s never made one bit of sense to me,” Roberts says. “When we were recording and working on stuff with Wynton in the ’80s, all we honestly wanted to do was become better musicians. We understood that we really couldn’t play blues properly, and we understood that our playing of standards was not up to the level that was established by Louis Armstrong and all these people, so we were really just interested in becoming much more proficient in the art of playing jazz.
“We’re not trying to create some weird museum where we’re just infatuated with the past. It’s a reverence for the standards they set. It’s a way of ensuring that the music will continue to be played at a high level.”
Roberts’ own mentors have included other blind keyboard players, such as the late jazz great George Shearing, who urged the teenaged Roberts to learn how to read braille music, and his childhood idol Stevie Wonder, now a friend who keeps him posted on the latest technology for the visually impaired. For many years, Roberts avoided discussing his disability, not wanting it to define his work, but over time his thinking has evolved.
“Everybody’s got some struggle or adversity that they’re dealing with, and if they can understand how you were able to confront and manage a disability, that becomes something that can be of uplifting significance to somebody else’s life,” he says. “I have a responsibility to speak up for disabled people and to represent them as people, not as a category, and that’s the issue with categories and labels, because it restricts people into a box that doesn’t really honor their humanity.”
Drewry Simmons Vornehm Jazz Series
MARCUS ROBERTS AND THE MODERN JAZZ GENERATION
Saturday, May 4, at 8 p.m.
The Palladium
Tickets from $25
TheCenterPresents.org/MarcusRoberts
