Marcus Roberts is the blind jazz pianist whose mission has been to forge jazz piano’s future by reinventing its past.
He’s part of a new class of post-modern traditionalists who uses the music of piano masters before him as the backbone of his repertoire. Household names: Jellyroll Morton, James P. Johnson, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Classically trained, Marcus Roberts was a sort of teenage prodigy who impressed many with both his style and a phonographic memory of playing back jazz and pop music after only several listens.
But it was his work as a sideman to the all-powerful Wynton Marsalis and well as his tenure as music director for the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra that indelibly set his style and philosophy as one of jazz’s silver polishers who has little patience for anything that deviates from it.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Marcus Roberts;