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Talent times three
Each player brings his own creative perspective to the Marcus Roberts Trio.
By PHILIP BOOTH
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 22, 2001
Marcus Roberts gravitated to jazz as a 12-year-old child in Jacksonville, listening to Duke Ellington's music on a radio show. So the pianist's berth on the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center's Take the "A" Train festival, in which he'll be playing music from his 1999 In Honor of Duke album, represents something like synchronicity.
"I just remember being baffled about the chords he was playing," says Roberts, 37, best known for his work with Wynton Marsalis' groups. "I was very interested in trying to figure out as much as I could about how he was doing what he was doing. That led to exploring other people, like Teddy Wilson, Count Basie and Fats Waller."
In Honor of Duke, in addition to honoring the great bandleader and composer, allowed Roberts to solidify the musical identity of his trio with acclaimed young drummer Jason Marsalis and bassist Roland Guerin. The two will join the pianist Sunday night.
Marsalis and Guerin, both based in New Orleans, have released albums on their own and appeared on numerous recordings by others. The drummer last year quit his post with popular African-Latin-jazz outfit Los Hombres Calientes to spend more time focusing on his own quintet and Roberts' trio.
"Since it's all original music, it allowed us to really nail down the concept," Roberts, a longtime Tallahassee resident, said by telephone recently from his native Jacksonville. The album "did become a piece of music that I feel we alone could play. I don't think there's anyone else that could play it. And there's something about that that gives us a certain sound. With Wynton Marsalis, we got to a point where, with (1988's) The Majesty of the Blues -- that identified the sound of that particular septet. It was a sound that only we could reproduce."
Roberts' approach to trio playing has deepened and broadened considerably since the release of Gershwin for Lovers, a 1994 outing with bassist Reginald Veal and drummer Herlin Riley, former rhythm-section partners in Marsalis' band. The three, observed during a New York performance celebrating the release of that disc, played together with the greatest of sensitivity, hinting at trios led by Ahmad Jamal and Oscar Peterson. But the new group is even more impressive.
"Because of the immense talent of both Jason and Roland, they have a lot of creative ideas that they bring to the table," Roberts says. "So it was a good thing to focus on that and to write music and work on things that allowed them to expand on a lot of those ideas. The music is designed so that both Roland and Jason can really dictate the direction spontaneously in the same way that I can. That's really the greatest thing about it. That really opens it up."
Roberts studied piano with Leonidus Lipovetsky at Florida State University, and in his early 20s began racking up awards, winning the Jacksonville Jazz Festival's prestigious Great American Jazz Piano competition and taking home the first Thelonious Monk Competition award.
He played with Wynton Marsalis' septet from 1985 to 1991 and then until 1995 was the trumpeter's right-hand man in the Jazz at Lincoln Center program. Roberts notched a place in the history books with his debut album, 1988's The Truth Is Spoken Here, and its two successors: The pianist became the first musician to have his first three recordings top Billboard's jazz chart.
Roberts' next projects include an arrangement of Porgy and Bess for trio and orchestra, and a collection of standards to be titled Last Slow Dance. He's also been named artist in residence for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City.
His artistic philosophy, defined by a reverential approach to jazz history, is rooted in pursuit of a sound he first heard in gospel music.
"When I used to play in church, there were periods of time when older people in the congregation would sing," Roberts says. "It really was a kind of an eternal folk sound that they got.
"You hear that sound in Ellington, Coltrane, Monk, Billie Holiday. It's a universal sound that has various individual perspectives."
PREVIEW
Marcus Roberts Trio, with Roland Guerin and Jason Marsalis, Sunday, 7:30 p.m., Louise Lykes Ferguson Hall at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Tampa. Tickets are $14.50 to $24.50. Call (813) 229-7827 or (800) 955-1045.
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