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About four decades ago and a few years before he burst onto the world jazz scene, Count Basie was asked by Marcus Roberts, then a music student at Florida State University, how he had become such an exceptional and imposing musician.
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“How did you become Count Basie? What did you do?” Roberts remembers asking.
The jazz legend responded. “The only thing I did was learn a lot of music that I liked. But I only kept the part that made me feel like myself.”
It was an answer as profound as it was simple. And Roberts, now 58, has been exemplifying Basie’s response as he himself has matured and deepened as an artist.
Hailed as a virtuoso and eloquent talent since joining trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’s band in the mid-1980s, Roberts says that the jazz music that preceded him provides him with a bottomless well of material and inspiration.
“I still want to have time to study Nat Cole’s trio, Bud Powell’s melodic bebop, Errol Garner’s incredible lyricism. There’s a lot to cover,” says Roberts.
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While some jazz critics over the years have portrayed Roberts, and also Marsalis, who played at the Ottawa Jazz Festival last month, as rehashing jazz past, Roberts says he is in “passionate disagreement.” ”.
Jazz, he says, is “a living history.” Performing music with an impeccable pedigree “doesn’t stop you from being yourself,” says Roberts.
“(Thelonious) Monk’s music can help somebody now, just like it did in the late 1950s,” he says. “I want it to be relevant to the lives of the people living it,” he adds.
Roberts, whose trio performs in Ottawa on Wednesday as part of the Music and Beyond festival, rose to the top of the jazz scene when he joined Marsalis’s band in time to record the trumpeter’s lavish 1986 album, J Mood.
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Roberts’ brilliance was especially striking because he has been blind since the age of five due to glaucoma and cataracts.
Growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, Roberts immersed himself in music and the piano as a child. At first he played by ear in church and then took piano lessons.
When Roberts was 12 years old, he first did jazz on the radio, and in particular at Duke Ellington. “He was intrigued by the chords,” he says. While Roberts attended the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, Ray Charles’s alma mater, he began his self-directed deep immersion in jazz, which involved countless hours in the school’s music room.
That said, Roberts says jazz didn’t overwrite the love he had for pop music from his youth, including Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, or gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin.
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In fact, his mother, who is also blind, was a gospel singer who influenced Roberts’ artistic creed.
“The biggest thing my mom taught me, the biggest thing, was that when you play for people, they have to feel something directly from you,” he says. “Harmonic principles, scales, chords, people don’t care about any of that. They need to get some emotional feeling from you that correlates with the life they’re living.”
In college, Roberts took piano lessons from Leonidas Lipovetsky. “He really taught me more about the aspects of the piano that were deeper: tone, voice and texture, balance in terms of playing multiple lines, pedaling, intricate things that make it sound and identify you as you,” says Roberts. “It took me years to unpack everything he taught me.”
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After Marsalis agreed to Roberts’ request to be in his band, the pianist stayed with the trumpeter for nearly a decade. He cites rhythmic explorations, blues, and investigations of the influences of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman as priorities for the band.
Roberts began releasing albums under his own name during his time with Marsalis and says he only left the band because he started writing his own music.
“I needed to have a platform to explore it,” says Roberts. “I loved what we were doing. It was a very painful decision to leave. But I did it. I had a lot of things piano-wise that I needed to figure out.”
In Ottawa, Roberts and his trio will perform some of his compositions as well as music by such heroes as Coltrane, Monk, Scott Joplin, Fats Waller and George Gershwin.
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Roberts describes his trio’s approach as essentially democratic. “I didn’t think that bass and drums should just accompany (piano)… All three instruments should have the same power and conceptual freedom to influence the music.
“That frankly requires a lot more trust,” he says. “That’s what interests me”.
True to the spirit of Music and Beyond, the trio will also perform their rendition of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
“I’m usually not really a Beethoven and Chopin player publicly,” says Roberts. But he praises Beethoven as a genius whose music has what he calls “the sound of inevitability,” in which each note must follow the next. Roberts says that with proper study, a jazz musician can improvise inspired by Beethoven.
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“People are looking for connecting threads between these art forms,” he says. In fact, Roberts sees a special value these days in music as a way of bringing together different groups of people.
“I’ve been very tenacious about wanting to find new material to have that conversation,” he says. “I think it’s very important, given the tribalism that seems to be sweeping the world, we’re not that into the collaborative stuff.
“In music, we need to show that direction.”
the marcus roberts trio
Presented by Music and Beyond
When: July 13, from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Where: Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Center
Tickets: from $40 for general admission, $20 for students, at musicandbeyond.ca
