TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/071789/07178900.042

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 69 lines

MUSIC, Page 85

Cooking at the Keys

Marcus Roberts takes his jazz piano up the charts

By Jay Cocks


    They were not really epiphanies. The way he tells it, Marcus
Roberts' decisive moments of musical inspiration -- those times
when you hear a tune and your whole life changes -- were more like
. . . bumps. No epic moments. Just a few small occasions of
collision.

    The first one -- the seminal one -- happened when Roberts was
eight, and he collided with a new piano in his home in
Jacksonville. He had been blind for four years, and was not so much
startled as seduced. "I sat right down," Marcus says, in his soft
but insistent voice. "I thought, `This, apparently, is for me. I
could work on this all day.'"

    A bit shy of two decades later, Roberts, 25, finds himself with
an album that has climbed to the top of the Billboard jazz chart.
The Truth Is Spoken Here is a dexterous and loving homage, "a
tribute," Roberts says, "to the artists who were the masters of the
form." There are two Ellington compositions, In a Mellow Tone and
a supernal rendition of Single Petal of a Rose, and a version of
Thelonious Monk's classic Blue Monk that Roberts brings off with
such light witchery that the song sounds reborn. Truth (which also
boasts five Roberts originals) has all the well-studied funk of the
new jazz as performed by the likes of Wynton Marsalis.

    This is no coincidence. For the past four years, Roberts has
been Marsalis' man on piano for both touring and recording.
Marsalis plays trumpet on Truth, and his brother Delfeayo produced
the album. The result has the righteous precision Marsalis brings
to his playing, but this is Roberts' showcase.

    He started noodling around on the piano when he was five,
picking out notes when he accompanied his mother and father to
church. It was these little improvs that led his parents to buy a
piano. Roberts' mother was a gospel singer, his father a
longshoreman, and it was no easy thing to come by money. At first
young Marcus taught himself, and after a year he was good enough
to play in church. He played with one hand or the other, but still
hadn't figured out how to make both work together. "Horrible hand
position," he remembers. At twelve, he started to take formal
lessons in doing what came naturally.

    Bump! He was beginning to find his own way. There were other
lessons to learn. His teacher played him some Art Tatum. Bump!
"`Does he have three hands?' It was the first time I heard
something I couldn't see myself doing." He kept on learning and
playing. He met Marsalis during his days at Florida State
University in Tallahassee. Bump again! Marsalis talked to Roberts
about the roots of jazz, challenged him intellectually, encouraged
him to develop a philosophy: "Feeling is not fact." By senior year
Marsalis invited Roberts to play a few gigs. Florida State promptly
lost a promising music major.

    Reticent about his personal life (he still lives in
Tallahassee), Roberts is evangelical about jazz. "Children don't
get a chance to hear much jazz," he says. "If you eat at McDonald's
all your life, then you won't like broccoli the first time you
taste it." When Roberts is cooking at the keys, though, he serves
up jazz that is not only knowledgeable but accessible. Contemporary
jazz can be too hip to draw in the listener: the more intrepid the
music, the more insistent it seems about sealing itself off.
Roberts' gift is to keep connected to past masters like Monk while
extending the music's possibilities -- and its audience -- into the
future with a light and open hand. Bump!


-- Elizabeth L. Bland/New York