MARCUS ROBERTS TRIO
FEBRUARY 5, 2023 AT 4:00PM free admission
Visual Artist: Annelies Dykgraaf
ST. PAUL’S BY-THE-SEA EPISCOPAL CHURCH
THE ARTISTS
Marcus Roberts, piano
Roland Guerin, bass
Jason Marsalis, drums
The Marcus Roberts Trio is known for its virtuosic style and entirely new approach to jazz trio performance. While most jazz trios have the piano front and center, all members of the Marcus Roberts Trio share equally in shaping the direction of the music by changing its tempo, mood, texture, or form at any time, and they do this with lightning quick musical reflexes and creative imagination. The Trio is known for having almost telepathic communication on the stage. More than a few concert goers have been heard to say that it sounds like a lot more than three people up there on the stage!
The Marcus Roberts Trio believes in ‘letting the music take over’ and the result is a powerfully rhythmic and melodic sound that is filled with rhythmic, harmonic, and dynamic contrast. One of the most enjoyable aspects of watching this trio perform is that it is so evident that these three musicians are really having fun playing together and listening to each other.
“One way Roberts individualizes his sound is by utilizing orchestral devices initially borrowed from the Ahmad Jamal Trio. In the course of a single piece, he constantly modulates grooves, tempos and keys, plays separate time signatures with the right hand and the left, and, as he puts it, “flips around the roles of the piano, bass and drums by giving everyone an equal opportunity to develop the concepts and themes, to change the form, to get us where we’re getting ready to go.” Ted Panken, Jazziz Magazine. Added to the logic and balanced trio style of Ahmad Jamal, is the swing and virtuosity of the Oscar Peterson Trio, combined with the buoyant joyous sound of Erroll Garner. These influences provide a rich foundation for the ever evolving and expanding sound of the Marcus Roberts Trio. The musical cues combine with musical inspiration from all over the world, which guarantees that audiences never know where this trio is heading; influences from Africa, Europe, and South America are combined with American traditions to give this group an infinite palate of styles, timbres and colors to draw from.
Marcus Roberts
Pianist/composer Marcus Roberts has been hailed “the genius of the modern piano”. In 2014, the celebrated CBS News television show, 60 Minutes, profiled his life and work on a segment entitled “The Virtuoso”. The show traced Roberts’ life to date from his early roots in Jacksonville and at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind to his remarkable career as a modern jazz musician.
Roberts grew up in Jacksonville, FL where his mother’s gospel singing and the music of the local church left a lasting impact on his own musical style. He began teaching himself to play piano at age five after losing his sight, but didn’t have his first formal lesson until age 12. Despite that late start, he progressed quickly through hard work and good teachers. At age 18, he went on to study classical piano at Florida State University with the great Leonidas Lipovetsky, whose own teacher was the celebrated Madame Rosina Lhévinne.
Roberts has won numerous awards and competitions over the years, but the one that is most personally meaningful to him is the Helen Keller Award for Personal Achievement. While Roberts is known for his remarkable ability to blend the jazz and classical idioms to create something wholly new, he may be even better known for his development of an entirely new approach to jazz trio performance.
Roberts’ critically-acclaimed legacy of recorded music reflects this tremendous artistic versatility. His recordings include solo piano, duets, and trio arrangements of jazz standards as well as original suites of music for trio, large ensembles, and symphony orchestra. His popular DVD recording with the Berlin Philharmonic showcases his ground-breaking arrangement of Gershwin’s Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra (“A Gershwin Night”, EuroArts 2003).
Roberts launched his own record label, J-Master Records, in 2009. Since then, he has released several popular recordings on that label including New Orleans Meets Harlem, Volume 1 (trio), Deep in the Shed: A Blues Suite (nonet), Celebrating Christmas (trio), From Rags to Rhythm (trio), Together Again: Live in Concert (quartet), Together Again: In the Studio (quartet), and Romance, Swing, and the Blues (with the Modern Jazz Generation). In the fall of 2017, he released his newest recording called Trio Crescent: Celebrating Coltrane. Roberts tours with his long-standing trio featuring two phenomenal musicians—Rodney Jordan (bass) and Jason Marsalis (drums). Marsalis has held the drum chair in the trio for 22 years and when this trio performs, they sound like they have been performing together for decades. One of Roberts’ more recent musical projects is the founding of a new band called The Modern Jazz Generation. This multigenerational ensemble is the realization of Roberts’ long-standing dedication to training and mentoring younger jazz musicians. Both Marsalis and Jordan are also key founding members of this band.
In addition to his renown as a performer, Roberts is also an accomplished composer who has received numerous commissioning awards, including ones from Chamber Music America, Jazz at Lincoln Center, ASCAP, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and the Savannah Music Festival, which co-commissioned him to write his first piano concerto—”Spirit of the Blues: Piano Concerto in C-Minor” (2013). In 2016, Roberts premiered his second piano concerto, “Rhapsody in D for Piano and Orchestra”, at the Ozawa Music Festival in Matsumoto, Japan. That piece was commissioned by the Seiji Ozawa and the Saito Kinen Orchestra.
Roberts has long been dedicated to the training and development of younger musicians. Each year, he returns to the Savannah Music Festival where he serves as an Associate Artistic Director as well as the Director of the annual Swing Central Jazz programs that bring high school students from all over the country to Savannah for educational programs and a band competition. Roberts is an associate professor of music at the School of Music at Florida State University. He holds an honorary Doctor of Music degree from The Juilliard School.
Roland Guerin
With a new band and a new project entitled Grass Roots, New Orleans based singer-songwriter-bassist Roland Guerin is starting a new musical chapter. Drawing from a wide spectrum of genres, including American folk, blues, zydeco, rock and jazz, Guerin creates a singular style at the heart of which are stories told through multi-layered melodies, rhythms and expressive lyrics in the range of Steely Dan, Sting and Peter Gabriel.
Raised in a musical family – his father was a great lover of jazz and classical music, his mother, a blues and zydeco bass player – Guerin began playing bass at the age of 11. Throughout his formative years, Guerin was strongly influenced by pop, rock and R&B music of the 70’s and 80’s. Bands and artists such as Cameo, Dazz Band, Rush, the Brothers Johnson, Gerry Rafferty, America, and Booker T & The MG’s seeded his love for great songs and inspired him to write music of his own.
While studying Marketing at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Guerin joined legendary jazz educator Alvin Batiste’s Band, The Jazztronauts. Having inherited much of Batiste’s musical innovations and concepts, Guerin developed ways to bring his own musical voice to life. The jazz genre became his avenue toward success. Over the course of his career, Guerin toured and performed with legendary musicians, such as George Benson, Jimmy Scott, Frank Morgan, Vernel Fournier, Gerry Mulligan, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, John Scofield, Mark Whitfield, Ellis Marsalis, Marcus Roberts, and Paul Gilbert. He also participated in the recording of numerous albums, including the Blind Boys of Alabama’s Grammy Award winning album Down in New Orleans, Marcus Roberts’s Grammy Award nominated recording of George Gershwin’s classic Rhapsody in Blue, and Allen Toussaint’s album Connected.
As a member of the Marcus Roberts Trio from 1994 to 2009, Guerin performed at the head of symphony orchestras across the world, among which the Berlin Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, and Seiji Ozawa’s New Japan Philharmonic. From his collaboration with Ozawa and Roberts, Guerin developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of orchestration and arrangement, both of which carry great importance in his own musical composition.
In 1998, Guerin released his first album, The Winds of the New Land, featuring Peter Martin on piano, Nicholas Payton on trumpet, Donald Edwards on drums, and Mark Whitfield on guitar. The record was acclaimed for its innovative style of composition and arrangement. JazzReview called it “a literal piece of art”, while the New Orleans Magazine named Guerin a Contemporary Jazz All-Star. He followed up with an album from the Roland Guerin Sextet, Live at the Blue Note, released by Half Note Records. Over the following decade, Guerin released 4 more successful albums, and performed with his own band at major venues and festivals worldwide, such as the Blue Note in Tokyo and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
Guerin joined the Allen Toussaint Band in 2008, touring and performing with Toussaint until his passing in 2015. Soon thereafter, Guerin joined the band of legendary Dr. John, becoming his last Musical Director. During his time with Toussaint and Dr. John, Guerin found his way back to his musical roots. Integrating American folk melodies, blues, zydeco, African rhythms, and rock with jazz soloing and orchestral arrangements, Guerin creates an entirely new and singular musical experience.
Jason Marsalis
Drummer Jason Marsalis is the youngest son of pianist and music educator Ellis Marsalis. At age seven, he was sitting in with his father’s jazz group and progressed so rapidly as a drummer that his father started using him for some of his own engagements. Shortly after graduation from New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in 1995, Marsalis joined a new trio lead by virtuoso pianist Marcus Roberts, while furthering his educational goals at Loyola University in New Orleans. In 2008, Marsalis began playing vibraphone and touring with his vibes quartet. At the same time, Marsalis has remained an instrumental member of the Marcus Roberts Trio. His skill at the drum set has been a critical part of the sound and philosophy of the trio for many years, and, in fact, he has been featured on all of Roberts’ recordings for almost 25 years. During that same time period, he continued to release his own recordings both on vibes and on drums. His most recent recording, Melody Reimagined, Book 1, was critically acclaimed in the jazz world. In recent years, Marsalis has also become increasingly known for his own educational contributions. He frequently teaches at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts and he is a key member of The Modern Jazz Generation group, helping to train many of the younger musicians in the band.
BFAS 50th Signature Concert Sponsors
In addition to its outstanding concerts and educational outreach programs, BFAS also presents an art exhibition from a regional visual artist at each home concert.
Works are showcased at the concert and at the reception following each concert. Concert attendees are able to meet the artists at the reception. The exhibition remains in place for several weeks and works are available for purchase.
VENUE
St. Paul’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church
465 11th Avenue North
Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250
Doors open at 3:15PM
MARCUS ROBERTS TRIO
FEB. 5, 2023 AT 4:00PM
free admission
Visual Artist
Annelies Dykgraaf
ST. PAUL’S BY-THE-SEA EPISCOPAL CHURCH
BFAS 50th Signature Concert Sponsors
THE ARTISTS
Marcus Roberts, piano
Roland Guerin, bass
Jason Marsalis, drums
The Marcus Roberts Trio is known for its virtuosic style and entirely new approach to jazz trio performance. While most jazz trios have the piano front and center, all members of the Marcus Roberts Trio share equally in shaping the direction of the music by changing its tempo, mood, texture, or form at any time, and they do this with lightning quick musical reflexes and creative imagination. The Trio is known for having almost telepathic communication on the stage. More than a few concert goers have been heard to say that it sounds like a lot more than three people up there on the stage!
The Marcus Roberts Trio believes in ‘letting the music take over’ and the result is a powerfully rhythmic and melodic sound that is filled with rhythmic, harmonic, and dynamic contrast. One of the most enjoyable aspects of watching this trio perform is that it is so evident that these three musicians are really having fun playing together and listening to each other.
“One way Roberts individualizes his sound is by utilizing orchestral devices initially borrowed from the Ahmad Jamal Trio. In the course of a single piece, he constantly modulates grooves, tempos and keys, plays separate time signatures with the right hand and the left, and, as he puts it, “flips around the roles of the piano, bass and drums by giving everyone an equal opportunity to develop the concepts and themes, to change the form, to get us where we’re getting ready to go.” Ted Panken, Jazziz Magazine. Added to the logic and balanced trio style of Ahmad Jamal, is the swing and virtuosity of the Oscar Peterson Trio, combined with the buoyant joyous sound of Erroll Garner. These influences provide a rich foundation for the ever evolving and expanding sound of the Marcus Roberts Trio. The musical cues combine with musical inspiration from all over the world, which guarantees that audiences never know where this trio is heading; influences from Africa, Europe, and South America are combined with American traditions to give this group an infinite palate of styles, timbres and colors to draw from.
Marcus Roberts
Pianist/composer Marcus Roberts has been hailed “the genius of the modern piano”. In 2014, the celebrated CBS News television show, 60 Minutes, profiled his life and work on a segment entitled “The Virtuoso”. The show traced Roberts’ life to date from his early roots in Jacksonville and at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind to his remarkable career as a modern jazz musician.
Roberts grew up in Jacksonville, FL where his mother’s gospel singing and the music of the local church left a lasting impact on his own musical style. He began teaching himself to play piano at age five after losing his sight, but didn’t have his first formal lesson until age 12. Despite that late start, he progressed quickly through hard work and good teachers. At age 18, he went on to study classical piano at Florida State University with the great Leonidas Lipovetsky, whose own teacher was the celebrated Madame Rosina Lhévinne.
Roberts has won numerous awards and competitions over the years, but the one that is most personally meaningful to him is the Helen Keller Award for Personal Achievement. While Roberts is known for his remarkable ability to blend the jazz and classical idioms to create something wholly new, he may be even better known for his development of an entirely new approach to jazz trio performance.
Roberts’ critically-acclaimed legacy of recorded music reflects this tremendous artistic versatility. His recordings include solo piano, duets, and trio arrangements of jazz standards as well as original suites of music for trio, large ensembles, and symphony orchestra. His popular DVD recording with the Berlin Philharmonic showcases his ground-breaking arrangement of Gershwin’s Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra (“A Gershwin Night”, EuroArts 2003).
Roberts launched his own record label, J-Master Records, in 2009. Since then, he has released several popular recordings on that label including New Orleans Meets Harlem, Volume 1 (trio), Deep in the Shed: A Blues Suite (nonet), Celebrating Christmas (trio), From Rags to Rhythm (trio), Together Again: Live in Concert (quartet), Together Again: In the Studio (quartet), and Romance, Swing, and the Blues (with the Modern Jazz Generation). In the fall of 2017, he released his newest recording called Trio Crescent: Celebrating Coltrane. Roberts tours with his long-standing trio featuring two phenomenal musicians—Rodney Jordan (bass) and Jason Marsalis (drums). Marsalis has held the drum chair in the trio for 22 years and when this trio performs, they sound like they have been performing together for decades. One of Roberts’ more recent musical projects is the founding of a new band called The Modern Jazz Generation. This multigenerational ensemble is the realization of Roberts’ long-standing dedication to training and mentoring younger jazz musicians. Both Marsalis and Jordan are also key founding members of this band.
In addition to his renown as a performer, Roberts is also an accomplished composer who has received numerous commissioning awards, including ones from Chamber Music America, Jazz at Lincoln Center, ASCAP, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and the Savannah Music Festival, which co-commissioned him to write his first piano concerto—”Spirit of the Blues: Piano Concerto in C-Minor” (2013). In 2016, Roberts premiered his second piano concerto, “Rhapsody in D for Piano and Orchestra”, at the Ozawa Music Festival in Matsumoto, Japan. That piece was commissioned by the Seiji Ozawa and the Saito Kinen Orchestra.
Roberts has long been dedicated to the training and development of younger musicians. Each year, he returns to the Savannah Music Festival where he serves as an Associate Artistic Director as well as the Director of the annual Swing Central Jazz programs that bring high school students from all over the country to Savannah for educational programs and a band competition. Roberts is an associate professor of music at the School of Music at Florida State University. He holds an honorary Doctor of Music degree from The Juilliard School.
Roland Guerin
While studying Marketing at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Guerin joined legendary jazz educator Alvin Batiste’s Band, The Jazztronauts. Having inherited much of Batiste’s musical innovations and concepts, Guerin developed ways to bring his own musical voice to life. The jazz genre became his avenue toward success. Over the course of his career, Guerin toured and performed with legendary musicians, such as George Benson, Jimmy Scott, Frank Morgan, Vernel Fournier, Gerry Mulligan, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, John Scofield, Mark Whitfield, Ellis Marsalis, Marcus Roberts, and Paul Gilbert. He also participated in the recording of numerous albums, including the Blind Boys of Alabama’s Grammy Award winning album Down in New Orleans, Marcus Roberts’s Grammy Award nominated recording of George Gershwin’s classic Rhapsody in Blue, and Allen Toussaint’s album Connected.
As a member of the Marcus Roberts Trio from 1994 to 2009, Guerin performed at the head of symphony orchestras across the world, among which the Berlin Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, and Seiji Ozawa’s New Japan Philharmonic. From his collaboration with Ozawa and Roberts, Guerin developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of orchestration and arrangement, both of which carry great importance in his own musical composition.
In 1998, Guerin released his first album, The Winds of the New Land, featuring Peter Martin on piano, Nicholas Payton on trumpet, Donald Edwards on drums, and Mark Whitfield on guitar. The record was acclaimed for its innovative style of composition and arrangement. JazzReview called it “a literal piece of art”, while the New Orleans Magazine named Guerin a Contemporary Jazz All-Star. He followed up with an album from the Roland Guerin Sextet, Live at the Blue Note, released by Half Note Records. Over the following decade, Guerin released 4 more successful albums, and performed with his own band at major venues and festivals worldwide, such as the Blue Note in Tokyo and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
Guerin joined the Allen Toussaint Band in 2008, touring and performing with Toussaint until his passing in 2015. Soon thereafter, Guerin joined the band of legendary Dr. John, becoming his last Musical Director. During his time with Toussaint and Dr. John, Guerin found his way back to his musical roots. Integrating American folk melodies, blues, zydeco, African rhythms, and rock with jazz soloing and orchestral arrangements, Guerin creates an entirely new and singular musical experience.
Jason Marsalis
Drummer Jason Marsalis is the youngest son of pianist and music educator Ellis Marsalis. At age seven, he was sitting in with his father’s jazz group and progressed so rapidly as a drummer that his father started using him for some of his own engagements. Shortly after graduation from New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in 1995, Marsalis joined a new trio lead by virtuoso pianist Marcus Roberts, while furthering his educational goals at Loyola University in New Orleans. In 2008, Marsalis began playing vibraphone and touring with his vibes quartet. At the same time, Marsalis has remained an instrumental member of the Marcus Roberts Trio. His skill at the drum set has been a critical part of the sound and philosophy of the trio for many years, and, in fact, he has been featured on all of Roberts’ recordings for almost 25 years. During that same time period, he continued to release his own recordings both on vibes and on drums. His most recent recording, Melody Reimagined, Book 1, was critically acclaimed in the jazz world. In recent years, Marsalis has also become increasingly known for his own educational contributions. He frequently teaches at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts and he is a key member of The Modern Jazz Generation group, helping to train many of the younger musicians in the band.
In addition to its outstanding concerts and educational outreach programs, BFAS also presents an art exhibition from a regional visual artist at each home concert.
Works are showcased at the concert and at the reception following each concert. Concert attendees are able to meet the artists at the reception. The exhibition remains in place for several weeks and works are available for purchase.
VENUE
St. Paul’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church
465 11th Avenue North
Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250
Doors open at 3:15PM