Tag Archives: new music

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.

A quick word on “Jazz Nerds International”

by David R. Adler
Letlerland
June 15, 2010

Now that he’s issued a truly interesting follow-up, I’ll take the bait and weigh in on Jason Marsalis’s recent rant against “Jazz Nerds International” — i.e., young musicians so obsessed with being cutting-edge and complex that they ignore the history of the music and, perhaps more important, the need to connect with an audience beyond their fellow JNI peers.

Like many others, I objected to the sweeping generalizations and straw men in Jason’s first argument, on video. Complexity per se is not the issue, nor is playing in odd meters — lots of people do it well and without sacrificing an ounce of soul or emotion or historical awareness.

But in his new statement, Jason hits on something important when he attacks “innovation propaganda” in jazz. Ben Ratliff, in his recent book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, calls it “future-mongering.” I would describe it as an arm-folding mentality — particularly prevalent among some of my fellow jazz critics — that demands every new CD be some sort of shocking bolt from the blue, something that sounds utterly unlike the jazz we’ve come to expect. Or else, yawn.

Now, I love bold new sounds in music as much as the next person. But ultimately I think this is a bullshit, ahistorical criterion to impose on everyone who picks up a horn, not to mention an ungenerous way to approach listening. It’s the artist’s intentions that matter — and if the intention is clearly not to turn the jazz world on its ear, then it’s ignorant to write the music off for failing to do so.

What irks me the most about “innovation propaganda” is that it misrepresents the enormous struggle involved in learning to play jazz well. Years ago I knocked Stuart Nicholson for arguing that the embrace of neo-bop in the ’80s reflected that decade’s thirst for instant gratification. Learning bebop is instantly gratifying? Clearly, here is someone who never sweated it out on the bandstand or in the practice room, trying to crack the infinite riddles of a music all too often derided nowadays as “conservative.”

Oddly, though, I detect some of the same flippant disdain for hard-working young players in Jason Marsalis’s salvos. “I’m bored with the majority of the new music being played today,” Jason writes, and it’s a sentence that could have come straight from the arm-folding critics, the innovation propagandists he so detests. In any case, I couldn’t disagree more. I am anything but bored.