Tag Archives: Alphonso Horne

Roberts performs dizzying jazz tribute to Jelly Roll Morton

Somewhere out there, Jelly Roll Morton is smiling

by Mark Hinson
Tallahasee Democrat
February 18, 2013

Everything old really is new again.

Jazz piano great Marcus Roberts started his tribute to New Orleans jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton on Sunday night at Seven Days of Opening Nights with introductory remarks that also served as fair warning to what was about to happen on the stage.

Marcus Roberts performing at the Ruby Diamond Concert Hall in Tallahassee“When people think of Jelly Roll Morton, they think, ‘old,’ ” Roberts said as he got comfortable at his grand piano. “He is not old. We are not going to let that happen. His music is new. Especially if you have never heard it.”

During the first half of the concert, The Marcus Roberts Trio and a seven-piece horn section tore through new arrangements of Morton tunes such as “Doctor Jazz” and “The Pearls” with an enthusiastic precision that was, at times, jaw-dropping.

The highlight of the first half was “New Orleans Bump,” which featured a new arrangement by Roberts’ trumpet player Alphonso Horne (yes, horn is in his last name). The song may have been written in the Roaring Twenties but it sounded fresh and new as Horne pumped it full of strutting swagger. The arrangement also left plenty of room for Roberts to take off on a wild improvisation that was so full of charging rhythms and counter-rhythms that it could cause dizziness.

Remember the name Horne, who studied jazz at Florida State College of Music with Roberts as one of his professors. Horne has a big future in front of him.

The crowd of 710 in Ruby Diamond Concert Hall let out whoops and “wows” throughout the evening, whether it was for trills on the clarinet or a mind-bending improv from Roberts that sounded like boogie-woogie from another planet. Anyone expecting a stodgy museum piece or dry recreation of a Dixieland band was sadly mistaken.

Marcus Roberts performing at the Ruby Diamond Concert Hall in TallahasseeThe band lineup included Jason Marsalis on drums, Rodney Jordan on bass, Tim Blackman Jr. on trumpet, Jeremiah St. John on trombone, Joe Goldberg on clarinet, Tissa Khosla on baritone, Ricardo Pascal on saxophone and Stephen Riley on tenor saxophone. The concert had been billed as an octet but, hey, who cares if you add a few more players when they are this good?

Morton, who got his start playing in the brothels in his hometown of New Orleans, was a flamboyant figure who claimed he invented jazz. That may or may not be true, but he certainly was the first musician to sit down and notate the rambunctious new music of the 20th century. He also rubbed a lot of the other musicians the wrong way with his bragging and his flash (he had a diamond tooth), so that is probably why he was not well remembered when he died in near-poverty in the early ’40s.

While the party-hearty Morton may not have made it to the Pearly Gates after his death, he was definitely smiling his diamond-tooth smile somewhere in the great beyond on Sunday night.

Roberts, who turns 50 this year, is no stranger to the Seven Days. He and his group put on a memorable show with jazz singer Dianne Reeves a few years ago. Anyone who saw his reinvention of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” at Seven Days probably wondered how he could top that performance.

He just did.

The Seven Days of Opening Nights continues today with a screening of a film that was hand-picked by Tribeca Film Festival honcho Geoffrey Gilmore. The title is being withheld until showtime at 8 p.m. It is sold out.

Nine-Piece Band Animates a Six-Part Jazz Album

by Ben Ratliff
New York TImes
February 4, 2008

Marcus Roberts Trio at Allen Hall in New York City

Rahav Segev for The New York Times
Marcus Roberts on piano, performing from his 1990 album “Deep in the Shed” in the Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The album Marcus Roberts recreated from start to finish at the Allen Room over the weekend is 18 years old, but its mannerisms don’t come from any particular era. The key to “Deep in the Shed,” that record of six concisely written pieces in blues form, is its natural shuffling of elements from jazz’s entire life.

It’s also one of the greatest cultural artifacts that owes its existence to Jazz at Lincoln Center. “Deep in the Shed” is a product of that organization’s artistic forces: Mr. Roberts started working with Wynton Marsalis’s groups in 1985 and shortly thereafter became one of the first important pianists in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

The album wasn’t pedantic, explicitly connecting style X with style Y or pulling you through a chronological history of jazz. And it never became redundant either. It shifted keys and tempos, masked its blues form in the theme sections and could sound ancient — older than the Delta blues for instance — or modern.

One thinks of it in the past tense. At the Allen Room the album was performed on Friday and Saturday, twice each night, in separate seatings. That allowed about 2,000 people to hear its music in total. But for now its rediscovery will be limited. The album is out of print, which is strange; it’s not a record that should be shrugged off.

The playing in Friday’s early set, by a nine-piece band with only one of the album’s original musicians — Wessell Anderson, the saxophonist — was a little restrained, but the beauty of the compositions came through clearly. There were Ellington-esque saxophone voicings, rhythm-section passages that suggested the John Coltrane Quartet, and semi-Arabic scales. Each piece was carefully arranged and packed with incident and contrast.

One of the album’s pieces most easily remembered across 18 years is “E. Dankworth,” if only because the recorded version included Mr. Marsalis playing a charged, perfectly one-upping trumpet solo under the pseudonym of its title. (Mr. Roberts kept up the ruse, identifying E. Dankworth in his introduction as “a trumpet player from London who sounds a lot like Wynton.” Mr. Marsalis was in Los Angeles, performing with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.)

Sure enough, the “E. Dankworth” performance had a lot more than the trumpet solo. It’s a fast piece, but Mr. Roberts played sparely and without post-1960s harmonic clichés. The two tenor saxophonists, Derek Douget and Stephen Riley, alternated 12-bar stretches with wildly different tones — one honking, one mentholated. Jason Marsalis played a drum solo of immaculate logic, pumping the bass drum on every beat, then layering rhythms on top. Roland Guerin performed an unaccompanied bass solo, plucking and slapping.

Finally came Etienne Charles’s trumpet solo, which didn’t have the bravura or momentum of the original but had strength and a clear, almost classical sense of thematic organization. Mr. Charles, in his early 20s, was a student of Mr. Roberts’s at Florida State University; the other young trumpeter onstage, Alphonso Horne, bore a deep Wynton Marsalis influence.

This record, and this way of playing jazz, still has repercussions, and the show was a good example of how Jazz at Lincoln Center — in the near-total absence of a jazz vernacular or a jazz-record business — has set itself up to cultivate, manage and amplify them.