Full Transcript
Marcus:
I’m a jazz pianist, it’s important for people to know that jazz is one of the few group musics that allow pretty much anyone in who can follow the basic rules of what the art is all about. So you don’t have to be from Germany or you don’t have to be from New Orleans, you don’t have to be from this place or that place. You bring your tools into the music. And those tools help you to shape the individual point of view and perspective that you bring to it. And if people dig it, they’ll come and check you out. So for me, I’m a jazz pianist. But inside of that, you know, there’s a lot going on. I grew up in church, I grew up listening to Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, my mom was a gospel singer. And so she had this record of Aretha called “Amazing Grace,” which is a fantastic record, had a big impact on me as a kid because she’d be playing it at like five o’clock in the morning to get you up and ready for the day. Aretha just has that soul, that’s not something that a culture produces easily. So after losing her, it’s hard to replace that. So piano is what I’m interested in, but there are a lot of cultural influences.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson.
Pete:
And I’m Pete Lane. Our guest today is Marcus Roberts. Marcus is a world renowned, classically trained jazz musician widely known for his contributions to the jazz music idiom. Marcus is credited with a reinvention of the jazz trio concept. He’s also credited with bringing together classical and jazz idioms into a blend of the likes of which has never been heard before, but that keeps each of those idioms’ integrity while blending them for his audiences in both his compositions and performances. Marcus has also been referred to as the genius of the modern piano. Marcus, we’re honored to have you in the Blind Abilities studio. Welcome aboard.
Marcus:
Oh, thank you so much. I’m honored to be here. I think you guys have a fantastic show. It’s very enlightening, very encouraging at a time where we need that, we need positivity.
Jeff:
Well, thank you. And yes, we are in great need of some positivity. Marcus, when did you realize that it was jazz that you were headed for?
Marcus:
Yeah, that’s a funny thing. That didn’t really happen until I was about 12. And as a matter of fact, I was really looking for the all-star game on the radio and happened to stumble upon this show called Stereo 90 in Jacksonville, Florida, that was hosted by a guy named Norm Vincent. They were playing some Duke Ellington, and I think it was Duke Ellington with Louis Armstrong, I’m not sure, but it was definitely Duke Ellington. And I just remember hearing that and there were chords that I heard, harmonies that I heard, and I of course, like most arrogant, young, 12 year old kids, I thought I knew everything about everything, right. So when I heard these chords, I was like, well, wait a minute, I don’t know what that is. I was immediately intrigued by Ellington’s harmonies, the chords on the piano, and I started trying to figure them out. I’m still trying to figure them out. So that’s really how I got into it. Before that, like most kids, I was listening to the popular music of the day, which when I was growing up, that was the Commodores, Earth, Wind and Fire, a lot of those R&B groups. Stevie Wonder, of course, I mean, my aunt gave me Songs in the Key of Life for my 13th birthday. And I remember I went home for Christmas, and learned all the songs on there by the time I went back to school.
Pete:
And you’d been banging around on the piano for a number of years, by the time you were 12, weren’t you?
Marcus:
Yeah, I was self-taught, though, which for piano doesn’t really work. So I couldn’t have told you E flat major from A flat minor, you know, I couldn’t have told you any of that. So sometimes when I read reviews of my work, and they start saying, oh, he’s an intellectual traditionalist, I’m like, really, you know, I’m about as folk as they get actually, because when I first started off, I just played what I heard.
Pete:
What sounded good sounded good.
Marcus:
Pretty much. Like my mother used to always tell me, she said, look, people want to feel something from what you play. And so I would play something. And she would literally go, well, you know what, I don’t feel anything from that, so you’re gonna keep playing it until I feel something. That was one of the first big lessons about the importance of how we communicate in music to an audience, what the real goal of it is, because it’s really not so much about what we’re trying to achieve as artists, that’s individual. That’s whatever it is. But what really matters is the experience that we give people that they respond to, and that they get to decide what it means.
Jeff:
So you were 12 when you picked it up, when did you first start playing the piano?
Marcus:
Well, I was eight when I really started playing. I’ll tell you a funny story. This is one of the few times in my life where being blind was actually really hip, because I had always wanted a piano from the first time I used to play around with it at church when I could get five minutes after service. And I remember coming home one day after school, and I walked in the house, and I ran into something. And I was like what is this, I thought it was like maybe a piece of furniture that they needed to move. And I felt around and I was like, wait a minute, this can’t be- oh my God. And when I realized it was a piano, I immediately sat down. And according to my mother, I played a melody. I don’t know what the melody was, might have been something as simple as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” I don’t really know. But I couldn’t believe that I had access to an actual piano in my home. It was truly, to this day, arguably the greatest experience I’ve had as a musician, just the realization that they thought enough of me to do that. That’s really where it all started. I was self-taught, just played in church, figuring stuff out, like literally by ear, you know, no training whatsoever until I was 12.
Jeff:
So when did you learn all the jazz slang terms like hip and dig?
Marcus:
Well, some of that stuff might happen, you know, in college, I learned some of it because I used to go to music camp at Florida State when I was a kid, like I think I went to the jazz camp when I was 14. And they also had a classical music camp. I went to that one the following year. But yeah, a lot of those terms, I learned probably as a young adult in college, and to some extent in high school. But there weren’t a lot of actual jazz musicians at the school that I went to, I kind of had to train a lot of the students to play what I wanted to hear in the band. So that’s really where my teaching of people started. Because if I wanted to hear it, I had to be able to show them how to do it.
Pete:
Now you attended FSDB in St. Augustine, Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. When did you begin there?
Marcus:
I was 10. Actually, when I went there, my parents sent me there specifically to study music, the first teacher that I had, Mr. McCoy, he was really a wonderful human being, fantastic man. But I was a knucklehead. So I would not do any of the stuff that the man told me to do. And at one point, I just stopped going to the lessons, and my parents, they’re at home thinking he’s studying and he’s you know, blah, blah, blah. And they found out that I wasn’t going to the lessons, and oh, my goodness, this is old school, see, back then your parents would tell you to do something, maybe twice. By that third time you felt something. Okay, now, they’d be calling social services now. But back then, that was how things worked. And they told me if you don’t go to lessons and you don’t do what these people- we’re gonna take you out of the school, because they weren’t sending me there for any other reason, primarily it was music. At 12 I started studying with Hubert Foster, who was just a fantastic musician. He had a graduate degree in voice, he knew all kinds of stuff about the piano, he could build them, he could tune them, and the most valuable thing that he did was he made me learn Braille music, which I definitely did not want to do. I thought, well, I can play all the music I want to play already. He says, oh, you think that. He said, no, you got to be literate if you’re going to be a musician, and he gave me theory lessons every day, I had a lesson with him, like every day at 11 o’clock, five days a week for years. And I would say that that was one of the big foundations of my musical training, especially for piano.
Jeff:
What was it like when you realized you had what some people call a gift or a passion? What was it like to be challenged by a teacher? I mean, you were 12. You knew pretty much everything at that point. But now you had a teacher, a master, I would say, just for terminology point here. But what was it like to be challenged?
Marcus:
At first, it was very uncomfortable. Because at that age, you want to hear great job, and you want to just do your thing and do what you want to do. Musicians are honestly some of the most selfish people you’re ever going to run into. We kind of have to be, there’s a natural dysfunction that goes with being an artist. You’re trying to figure out aspects of life that don’t make sense to you. In some cases that can lead you into situations where you’re doing things that actually as far as your life are not good for you. Some of our greatest artists have been very tortured human beings. In jazz music a good example would be Billie Holiday, was one of our great great great jazz singers. Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, for sure. Which is why I always tell people don’t put men and women on a pedestal, put what they do on a pedestal, look up to that.
Pete:
Men and women are humans.
Marcus:
Yeah, yeah.
Pete:
With frailties.
Marcus:
Yeah, we’re flawed, dysfunctional , which is why we need people, right? Like if everybody was functional, had it all together, you wouldn’t need nobody. But in terms of just running into somebody who’s challenging you, it’s uncomfortable at first until you build enough trust to realize that they’re really trying to help you to become more of yourself. And so once I understood that, then studying with him became like a joy and we became real friends. And even at the point where I had grown up and had moved on, we still stayed in touch. I’m just so grateful to him, and also to David Middleton, who taught saxophone and he played the violin and piano as well. And he was the conductor of our orchestra that we had at school. And so he taught me how to play alto and tenor saxophone, taught me how to play drums, you know, things like that. So I’ve always had like an inexhaustible appetite for learning stuff about music, but the piano is such a demanding, it takes so much energy, the amount of repertoire and literature that’s written for it that I at some point, I left high school, I kind of quit playing saxophone. I still own one, I keep planning to pick it up and practice of it and maybe record something on it, but I just haven’t had the time to do it yet.
Pete:
You don’t have the time. Piano is a hard instrument for sure.
Marcus:
Oh my god. Yes, it is. The more I learn about it, the less I feel I know.
Pete:
Marcus, I’m in Jacksonville. I’m right up the road from Florida School for the Blind. And I frankly did not realize that they had such a strong music department.
Marcus:
Yeah.
Pete:
What about blindness skills? Did you focus on those or was that at a secondary point of interest to learn how to be blind?
Marcus:
From the time I was six years old, and was in school, realizing that all the sighted kids were reading and writing stuff and I couldn’t do it, that bothered me. And so we found someone who could teach me Braille, and I learned it in maybe six months or so. Instinctively, I had some intuitive sense. There were two things I knew: I needed to be able to read and write and I realized you’re gonna need to be really good at something. I grew up in a tough neighborhood. So a lot of the kids, you know how kids, oh, you got a disability, everybody’s insecure, nobody knows anything close to what they think they know. So a lot of times when people don’t know things, and they’re insecure, they attack people who don’t look like them, who aren’t like them. And that’s just what neighborhood children do. But I realized from how they were trying to talk to me, and I was too arrogant to really care what they thought about anything, but I did recognize that you want people talking about what you can do, you don’t want people focusing on what they think you can’t do. So that was one of the motivations that I had for literacy, learning Braille, being conscious, thanks to my mother early on, about how you look, when you walk out in public that people are looking at you. And even though you’re not looking at them, you need to be aware of that. People are gonna judge you, they see you pull out a cane, they see you with a dog, they see you at the airport and they put you in a wheelchair, you know, they’re just assumptions that people make about you. Because unfortunately, especially now, it’s more about them versus us. In the disabled community, we need to understand that we are part of them. To be part of us, we’re going to have to work a bit harder, do a lot more than really is fair so that we make it harder for people to judge us in a negative way.
Jeff:
Now, Marcus, what I’m hearing is your mom taught you to present yourself, to represent how she felt or how you felt you should be represented. You can control that. But you talked about your teachers saying to help you find yourself. You didn’t say teach you music like this, that, the other thing, but to find yourself, so he knew that it was in you. He was trying to bring it out, bring you out through the piano?
Marcus:
I think so. I think so. And even though I probably thought he was pushing a lot of stuff on me that I didn’t want to do, but yeah, that’s a really artful, poetic but real way of phrasing it, he wanted me to know enough so that as I grew up, all the choices that a musician can make would be available to me or many of them. Mr. Foster was somebody who knew the Messiah completely, like every part, you know, he did it every year. And one time he told me he was somewhere, I don’t know if it was a Lions Club event or something. And they were all singing it and the lights went out. And he was the only one singing and playing. The one thing I’ll tell you about sighted people, everything is cool and they’re in complete control until those lights go out. And then you see the real reason people have trouble with folks with disabilities, because they don’t know what to do, what to even think, because they have no idea of what’s in their environment. And they’ve lost control. And all disabilities affect you in that way. You’re trying to control your circumstances in your immediate environment. And you’re trying to control how you’re perceived based on what you are doing with other people. I was very fortunate to have a lot of good teachers at that school who really believed in the kids and they were transformative if you allowed them to be. Now, like any subset of people at the school I went to there were great students, there were students who ended up being con men or drug dealers, you know, everything that you could think of in a regular society was there. And since it was a school for the deaf and blind, even within a culture of disabled people, there was perceived discrimination, the blind kids, we always thought that the deaf kids got better stuff than us, that they were treated better, they had the best bowling alley, the best pool, you know what I mean? So this is just a cultural societal thing that every civilization and culture throughout history has had to deal with. And the only way that we can get over it is if we can make considered change through influencing each other. And you can only influence someone if they’re paying attention. And they’re affected by what you’re saying or doing, which is why music is such a powerful force.
Pete:
Marcus, you have compared playing with other jazz musicians to a democratic culture and society. Talk a little bit about that.
Marcus:
Yes, it’s true. Because to play jazz music, we improvise a lot of what we play, like I teach my students improvise, the root of the word is not “random,” the root of the word is “improved.” So your goal as a group is to make up music that if you wrote it down, would follow all of the logical rules that music imposes upon us, okay, all of what we call the elements of musical style, melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, the type of form that you’re playing, dynamics and instrumentation. And when it’s played properly, for you to get there, there has to be a mutual respect and real cooperation. Otherwise, music doesn’t work. And that’s not just true in jazz, I mean, that’s true in any genre of music for you to successfully play it. It just so happens in the case of jazz musicians, when we look back through the history of it, we find that jazz is the cornerstone of American culture, like the drum set, when you see a set of drums on the stage, I mean, this is because of Baby Dodds and Papa Joe Jones, because before that, in New Orleans, you know, they would march down the street, one guy would play the big bass drum, another guy would play the snare drum and somebody else would play the cymbals. So it was not assembled into a set of instruments until jazz musicians did it. And then the tuba, which was rump, bump, bump ba ba bump, you know, the tuba, the low part of the band with the trombone, that laid down to anchor that all the musicians would improvise on top off, and then the music went indoor, so they use the upright bass, string bass to replace it. And of course eventually in rock and roll, we have the electric bass, electric guitar, etc, etc. So the influence of a creative genius of putting all these instruments together and then coming up with a delightfully virtuosic but elegant way that we hear like great pianists like Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, or if we hear the way Jimmy Jones played behind Ella Fitzgerald. Or if we’re lucky enough to hear any of Ellington’s recordings from five decades of music, you see that this music actually, it’s always been about right now. But unfortunately, because of the commercialization of music, because of the need to sell product, we put things in buckets, in baskets, which to me, never made any sense. But again, to sell things, I guess that’s what we do. But I feel like all music has value if it speaks to you. And in the case of jazz music, the diversity of personality, and the diversity of all these very creative ways of using one’s individuality and talent in a group setting is a big part of how our music grew and influenced all these genres that came later. A lot of people, they confuse, you know, the styles of music that we refer to as the blues with jazz and people forget that the blues came from jazz, like that’s who started it. So when you hear somebody [bluesy piano riff] you know, I mean, that’s the folk part of our heritage. You hear it in all styles of music, but in the case of Louis Armstrong, like when he started playing trumpet in late 1918, 1920, and when he started recording in ‘23, with Bessie Smith, etc., etc., I mean, nobody was playing the trumpet like that. Okay, you look at a Beethoven symphony, right, great composer, what does he have the trumpet doing? They’re going [Beethoven piano riff]. You know what I mean? That’s what the trumpet is doing. Like throughout most of European music, Hayden, he wrote one Trumpet Concerto Hummel wrote a great E flat major Trumpet Concerto. And I remember it’s funny, years and years ago, when I used to work with Wynton Marsalis when I was a kid and came out on the road, we used to have these fun arguments about things. And he was literally trying to tell me that the trumpet was like, the superior instrument. I said, you got to be insane. I said, there are 32 great Beethoven sonatas for solo piano. Okay, so let’s just start there. Mozart had what, 17? Chopin had two great sonatas, B flat minor, B minor. So I mean, on and on and on, Prokofiev, nine, where’s the trumpet? Beethoven, he didn’t write anything for the trumpet that I know anything about. So the piano’s placed in culture, it’s well established. Even in America, George Gershwin, he was a great composer, great pianist, you know, Fats Waller wrote all kinds of hip tunes. You know, it just goes kind of, on and on. Now, I will say, after the Bebop era, which in some ways, to me, was a bit of an unfortunate part of jazz history, because at the point where you forget about the people, your music is gonna struggle. At the point where the people are not the center of what you’re doing, influencing them, not exploiting them, though, but giving them who they are. Because my argument is, people live very complicated lives, right? So why shouldn’t there be a music that expresses the real, varied tapestry of what people are actually going through, but you don’t have to get to the point where sophistication gives way to just complete intellectualism and self-orientation of what we would call innovation for the sake of saying it’s new. And when jazz went in that direction, which it did, people just moved on to rock and roll and other musics where they felt like they could get, again, a feeling, an emotion that’s about who they are, and what they’re dealing with. This is what people want from music. I try to make it clear when I play anything, I’m interested in putting the folk essence from as many hundreds of years as I can understand together with whatever the sophisticated structure or non-sophisticated structure, whatever the formal structure is, it’s about putting the folk essence inside of a modern framework that represents what people are living right now.
Pete:
Let me bounce back real quick, if you don’t mind, to your arguments with Wynton Marsalis about trumpet versus piano, what was his side of the argument as far as the trumpet being more important?
Marcus:
j, well, he said that, you know, you read the Bible, they’re not talking about pianos. You’re talking about Gabriel, the trumpet. I mean, all of the big military ceremonies that you see on television. I mean, it’s somebody playing taps at a state funeral-
Pete:
The calvary-
Marcus:
Yeah, the calvary, also in jazz history. I mean, probably the two most successful jazz musicians that we’ve had were probably Miles Davis and him. I mean, Wynton and Miles. I mean, they were very successful. I think Miles supposedly did a club date in Japan for one week for $700,000, I mean, that’s like rock and roll, you know, that’s not happening in most situations. The point of it, though, is that like athletes, musicians are very competitive, but I think when it’s based on love of music, and still a certain level of mutual respect among the musicians, I think it’s fine. I think that if it starts to, you know-
Pete:
Yeah, like teammates.
Marcus:
Yeah, exactly. You know, and I think for music, it has that same impact that sportsmanship has, and sportsmanship basically means that you have good manners win or lose, right? Music is the same thing. You know, I can’t be mad at you because you sold 10,000 more records than I did. That openness to just learning, which is really the key thing to being a musician is, and that’s one of the reasons why like when bands break up, it’s honestly never really because of money. I mean, most of the time, it’s because the musicians feel that there’s nothing left for them to do. They’re tired of playing like the same songs every night for like a year. Musicians continue to play together, if there’s something left to do. And I always have felt that way. You know, like, if I got tired of doing something for me, my best project, the best thing for me is whatever I’m working on right now, because whatever we did last year, I’m happy to do it again. But that’s not going to really help me grow if I’ve already done it. Now I’ve got to figure out that next step, figure out that next thing to do.
Jeff:
You bring up a great point. I know some musicians who are what I would consider jazz musicians, and I’ve heard them play stuff, but they never seem to play it the same way twice. And I think it’s because they’re in a different space when they’re doing it. They’re improvising. And I think what jazz, to me, my understanding is like when you enter into that intellectual stuff, I used to tell people, I can’t afford jazz. I’m not that rich. You know? It seems like they were putting it on a pedestal like, oh, you have to understand jazz.
Marcus:
It’s not true.
Jeff:
Yeah, they pull it away. But I remember, like when you said Fats Waller I’m like, oh, yeah, he had a rolltop piano album cover one time. I remember back when I was a kid.
Marcus:
No, you make a fantastic point. Jazz is not above anybody. Think about who created it! It wasn’t created by kings and queens, was it? Jelly Roll Morton grew up in the hood, okay, he didn’t have some privilege, like matter of fact, he got kicked out of his house at like 15. Louis Armstrong, I mean, he was in an orphanage. The people who created it were just like you, just like me. If anything, they would have the same argument that blind folks would have, like being completely misunderstood, looked down upon, trodden upon, racially discriminated against in most cases. But the thing that’s magical about that music is that they were able to describe the life that they deserved, and knew should be in musical terms. So they were able to put that out. So the regular people who are struggling with the same issues, could hear that music and still feel elegant and purposeful, and worth something. It had nothing to do with oh, how many records did we sell last week. See, this is before like mass commercialization and mass exploitation through the media. These were people who wanted to be good at something so that they could feel good about who they were, even though their circumstances were terrible, dreadful. Not right.
Pete:
So Marcus, have you heard that misconception that Jeff articulated a moment ago, that jazz is out of reach or lofty in some way? What do you think contributes to it? It’s obviously counter to the reality that you’ve just spoken about.
Marcus:
Well, I’ll be frank with you. A lot of times people don’t like jazz, because when they hear it, it’s poorly played. The second reason they don’t like it is because the songs are too long. I mean, those are two very basic things. But they’re really-
Pete:
No longer than the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West, you go on for five hours.
Marcus:
Yeah, but here’s the thing, if the people want to hear what you’re doing, and they know what it is, and they feel like they’re a part of it, that’s one thing, the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, you know, all these groups, they had massive followings of people who socially identified with them. Now, if I just start playing all kinds of crazy stuff, [piano riff] okay, and it goes on for like 10 minutes, I mean, what are you gonna do? That’s not gonna help you get a date, right? You know, you’re gonna be listening to that stuff going, when are they gonna stop, people start looking at their watch. Again, I hate to be down on my own music and people. But a lot of the problems have to do with jazz musicians themselves, not really wanting to be part of an interrelated culture, and part of a global community. So what we have is, again, categorization, which we all fell for, based on record labels and marketing people, instead of realizing that we’re musicians. Look at what the NFL does, they sell the entire League, the entire history of the League, the young stars like Patrick Mahomes, and then they sell Tom Brady, and even Peyton Manning who isn’t playing anymore, you know, they keep you in touch with the whole history of the thing, right? And it’s a collective thing. So they sell love for the game, we should do the same thing. And I’ve told musicians this my whole career, but you know, I mean, I’m not on covers of magazines, so that they’re not gonna listen to me. But it’s very clear to me what the issues are. To some extent, I would say that the blind community is the same, like we have a lot of talented people, but everybody’s doing their individual thing. So as a community, we don’t get addressed properly, because we don’t sell like the wholeness of what we are. You see what I’m saying? Like, we don’t really do that. And some of that is just the natural isolation that the disability imposes. But we live at a time now where we don’t have to keep doing that. We can sell our whole thing. It doesn’t have to be at an annual convention. You know what I mean? It has to be like a constant thing, where we get people to understand that all levels of blind children have value, every level, from somebody who doesn’t have a lot of resources and doesn’t have perhaps the literacy because of upbringing, etc., from that kid to a genius, all of the degrees have to be celebrated. Because in the sighted world, that’s what happens, every kid has a chance. And there are plenty of regular guys and gals who grew up all over the country who get that third chance. And for some reason, with a disability, we have the pressure of having to be so much better all the time. And we put some of that pressure on ourselves, that it really does send a message, that there’s something about you and the disability that doesn’t work in the culture. So to me, we have to think about that, and try to see if we can bring more understanding, again, a shared experience is what brings people together. I mean, that’s just my belief.
Pete:
Well stated.
Jeff:
That’s awesome. I mean, I was gonna ask like three different questions, but you wrapped it up there, like, what advice would you give as a 12 year old and I’m thinking well, at 12, you were already determined. I like how you intermix the blindness and the musician world as one. I play blind hockey, and we have beginners who are five years old, and they’re just getting their skates underneath them. And then we have the advanced players. And our goal this year coming up is to bridge that gap between them to move as a unit to all of us advance in a direction instead of splitting them up.
Pete:
You know, that is so incredible. And I’m saying that should be like a local news story, okay, you don’t have necessarily a bunch of sighted kids that are five years old that are out there doing that. And that’s sort of my point, the blind community is full of diversity, we represent so much of what America is globally. And this needs to be seen. But it needs to be seen by checking out like the regular people, and the quote, unquote, talented people, and the folks with names and the folks without names. You got to sell the whole community so that people quit being afraid of it, I mean, come on, y’all, I’m not walking up to you with a tin cup. Come on now, it’s 2021. Let’s advance our thinking. Because, to me, it’s very disturbing that despite the technological advances that we’ve had, that people’s view of blind people hasn’t really changed that much in the past 30 or 35 years. Dr. King used to talk about that. And he said that the technological advances are great, but if the moral universe doesn’t advance with it, nothing changes.
Jeff:
That crosses our whole society as of late.
Marcus:
It does, it does, because what we’re doing now is executing an attitude that says, if you’re not part of our tribe, we have no use for you.
Pete:
Exclusionary.
Marcus:
Or if you’re not part of our tribe, we need to get rid of you so that we can maintain control of your tribe. And this is not at all what our American constitutional values are supposed to be. And that’s why art is important. Like to matter to people, art has to address the potential inherent in them, to progress. That’s what art has always been for. It’s an essential component of it. And I’ve always argued, you know, the form in art is always important, because when you look at the real function, it’s always been ritualistic. Art protects people’s annual ceremonies, you know, birthday parties, weddings, you know what I mean? Music, painting, dance, it’s all a part of people confirming through their rituals, what they do day to day, but then the artist gets to experiment with that, and advance that to other levels aesthetically, which then gives us the ability to see more, to see farther, so that we have better tools to fight chaos. I mean, that’s what art really is supposed to do.
[Jazz piano plays]
Jeff:
Every once while a song comes out on the radio, whatever genre it is, or something, and sometimes, like there was a song called “My Sharona,” and it’s not much of a song really, but the beat, it seems like there’s a mathematical something that when people hear a song, they don’t have to listen to it a second time. They like it. It just seems like it goes into the brain and it falls into the sequence that is so receptive, that it becomes a hit. And no one knows why. The Macarena, there’s other types of stuff like that. Now with jazz, which I would say is more complicated, in a sense, rather than just boom, boom, it doesn’t have to be complicated. I’m not saying that. But it’s more diverse. There’s all sorts of stuff going on. Do you hear something in jazz? The way you’re wired, if I may, that just sinks right in? Just boom?
Marcus:
Well, I think for me, it did. But I think that what it really is, it’s a funny thing. I was talking to Stevie Wonder about this maybe three or four months ago. And he made the point to me, because we’re talking about this, you know, his music, which I know intimately well, he told me his music, he’’s always been interested in jazz, but he wanted to make sure that he could deal with the harmonic ideas that he had, but he always wanted there to be a component that was easy for people to follow. In other words, he had to balance the complexity with the folkness that I keep talking about. It’s like when you hear, [Beethoven piano riff] okay, Beethoven lets you know what this piece is about, like in the first two bars, right? So you don’t really have to be a genius to get da da da da. You know, I mean, that’s pretty clear, right? So I think the problem with a lot of jazz and unfortunately, classical music at this stage is, it’s too convoluted. If you sit down to a meal, and it’s supposed to be some kind of chicken, right? And you eat three or four bites and you’re like, well, where’s the chicken? So I think you have to- however complex music is or is not is fine. Like Ravel was a master of orchestration, master of melody, but a lot of his music is kind of repetitive. Like he plays it over and over so you get it. So creative repetition is what you’re really talking about. Now, the problem with a lot of today’s popular music though, is it goes the other way. It’s like chocolate chip cookies day, night, midday, right? Oom-cha, oom-cha. Okay, well, after about five minutes of that you got something else? But then what people are impressed with, like if a guitar player or a trumpet player or a piano player can actually play something that makes people go whoa, hmm. I wish I was a musician and could play that, to me that’s what it’s about.
Pete:
Is that the same as a hook? You know what I’m talking about? Like the “My Sharona” references, the first couple of bars, you’re hooked or you’re not.
Marcus:
Well, the hook, I don’t know if I really believe in that. I mean, I remember when Michael Jackson put out “Thriller,” it wasn’t popular at first, but then eventually it sold like 60 million records. So it’s hard to know when something is going to reach people. But I can tell you this, if they hear it over and over and over in the same way that like, why do people advertise, right? Because you’re telling them over and over and over, you need this kind of soap, right? Intuitively, you’ll just go get that, you won’t even really be thinking about it. So I think that in terms of a hit, I would never claim to know what makes that. I don’t think Bobby McFerrin ever really knew that “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was going to be like a big smash hit. And Louis Armstrong hated “Hello, Dolly.” He had no sense that that song was anything other than something they did at the last minute that he thought was awful. But everywhere he went, hey, can we hear “Hello, Dolly?” Like what? Like if we really knew what a hit needed, you could actually do it. But no one knows.
[snippet of jazz song]
Pete:
Moving over to your compositional objectives, what do you set out to do when you sit down to write a composition?
Marcus:
Well, sometimes it really is driven by pure creativity. Sometimes I’m just at the piano and I hear something. And I want to lay it down for later retrieval. Other times, it’s a project that has to get done. So I might think to myself, specifically, I want this to be in E major. I want it to- like I had a piece like that not too long ago, I wanted it to be pretty. I wanted it to be modeled somewhat after the second movement of Ravel’s great G major Piano Concerto, which is also in E major. So I had this line:
[piano]
I had that much. And so it took me like a week to finally get the whole:
[snippet of “Seeking Peace” plays]
And so I called it “Seeking Peace.” I wanted to have like a peaceful feeling to it just because of all the turmoil that’s been going on, you know, and something that had a rhythmic simplicity. It’s not all over the place. And again, a melody-
[another snippet of “Seeking Peace” plays]
so that somebody could like hum that, maybe they can hum that or think of that, to me, music has to reach people. And it shouldn’t be hard because music is inside of us. It’s in our brain. It’s in our mind, it’s in our imagination. You know, it’s just part of the universe that we live in, you know what I mean? Now, the instrument of piano, of trumpet, of saxophone, that’s external, right? It’s outside. So it’s almost anti, like the piano doesn’t help you at all. Like you have to get it subject to your creative will. You have to make it do things that maybe no one thinks it can do. And so that’s the battle and that’s why when young people who, why should I practice, I go well, because you can’t play music, unless you can master some kind of instrument and the instrument is not designed to do what you want it to do. Because it’s not the human voice, it’s not nature, it’s artificial.
Jeff:
You talk about repeating things, doing it over and over. I mean, your parents, you know, they tell you once, they tell you twice, and then you talked about 11 o’clock, five days a week, you got your lessons, if you hear something long enough, you start to believe in it, it seems like your passion for it, you’ve had a love for it from age eight, when that piano was in front of you and stuff, you just keep on repeating it, you just keep on finding it. And you said, you hear something, you hear it in your head. And then you talked about the piano being the external piece, that bridge from your mind to your talents, your skills. And that’s what they’re preparing you for. Because you didn’t know what you needed to know when all of a sudden you wanted to find yourself inside like Mr. Foster told you. And there you were, now, being able to use the mechanics and things to bring your mind to the piano, to the ears of others.
Marcus:
Exactly. And that’s the key. All of this is about from you, the artist, to the instrument, to the people. And if you are successful, you want the people to feel that same emotion that you felt. That’s really the key goal, the key objective, and if there is a reason that people respond to music, again, it’s their experience. To me, it’s not about the art form really. What it’s about is when people come into contact with the art form, the experience that it gives them, that’s what makes it worth something. You see? That’s why unfortunately, Bach’s music lay dormant for 150 years until Felix Mendelssohn got people to reinvest in it. He’s like, what’s wrong with y’all, Bach is incredible, come on now, let’s, let’s play this music. Because a culture, I mean, plenty of people will go their whole lives without hearing one note of jazz, and it’s not going to affect them in the least because there’s other music out here. There are other folk traditions out here. And if you think of the pentatonic scale, [pentatonic scale on piano] right, every culture has its spin on it, like the Japanese people they [Japanese pentatonic scale on piano], right, it’s not the exact same five notes, but it’s a five note scale that delineates a folk sound. And in the case of blues playing, [bluesy piano scale] right? Pentatonic. So when I’m teaching, again, I try to give young people skills based on understanding, unfortunately, a certain intellectual component of what these things are, or are not, because this is a 440. It’s not an opinion. It’s a frequency, right? I mean, it’s, you know, and so I always tell people, music is actually an objective, definable thing, right? How you feel about it is subjective. How it moves you is your deal. So that’s the beauty of it. It’s an art form that allows both the expert and the listener to have rights that cannot be taken away or questioned.
[Jazz piece plays]
Jeff:
The importance of Braille for you, even though you, like a lot of youngsters, oh, I can listen to this audio. I don’t need Braille. How important was it to you, and to some youngsters that may be listening to this, what advice would you tell them about Braille?
Marcus:
Well, if you’re listening to me right now, learn Braille, start today. It’s essential, it’s essential. You want to be literate, you want to be able to confirm every letter that comes your way every letter that you write down. And as much as I love JAWS and voiceover, you can’t necessarily confirm that just from listening, in the same way that even with music, if you have a score, you really can’t look at every note, every pitch, every interval, your ears might deceive you, who is it, Rene Descartes that said that? You cannot depend on any one of your five senses, right? So I would encourage all young, blind children, adults, if you can learn Braille at all, learn as much as you can. For me it was an essential and is an essential part of every day of my life. I mean, I don’t mind listening to stuff but when it comes to it, like when I have my setlist on stage, I mean I have it written out in Braille, I have the solo order written out, I just want to make sure of what I’m doing. So that would be my advice, that literacy is key.
Pete:
A lot of people, Marcus, that we’ve spoken to are very curious about how you convey your musical compositions, your performances, using Braille as your tool, like how do you write music? Do you use Braille to write music? You’ve already said you use a setlist on stage and I’ve heard you perform lengthy pieces, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” for example. That’s a good long piece. Have you memorized every single note and every single nuance of that composition, or do you at any time use Braille on stage?
Marcus:
No, I don’t use Braille on stage for music. No, I play everything from memory, which is sort of a pianist thing anyway. We are required, sighted or not, to play from memory. When I compose, I now use Sibelius, that program, and I’m able to play the stuff in, check the notation, give it to my band, and then we rehearse it. And of course, I’m always, like a lot of maniacal composers, I’m changing stuff all the way up to five minutes before we walk on the bandstand. But again, the literacy, the ability, and that’s one of the things that Foster really preached, he made me learn staff notation so that if I had to dictate it the way Ray Charles used to have to do, you know, you could tell somebody who’s playing trumpet in their key what the notes are, is that a quarter note, is it a dotted quarter, is it staccato, is it legato, you want them to play it with a plunger mute or a straight mute or you know, all these things. I was able to get somebody to scan in the great book on orchestration that Rimsky-Korsakov wrote called Principles of Orchestration. So I constantly refer to that when I’m working on orchestrations. It’s a world of knowledge. It’s an entire world of color, and texture. And I have to say, even after all these years, I feel like there’s so much more that I need to learn. Now once I compose the music, and we rehearse it, then when we record it, that’s where Reaper comes in. And so at that point, we record it, and then I’m able to edit it and mix it and master it all in one program.
Jeff:
And you have the Braille in case you want to check out a particular-
Marcus:
Right, exactly.
Jeff:
You can hone in on that and go oh, there it is.
Marcus:
Exactly. You can hone in on it, which believe me I do. People say well, how do you know when you’re done? I say, well, I’m done with a project when listening to it doesn’t bother me in any way. And we’re done. And sometimes time just runs out. And that’s it. They need it in two days.
Pete:
If I could interject something here at the risk of sounding like I’m blowing smoke, it’s remarkable to me how humble you sound in terms of your overall position in not only the music community but the piano universe, knowing how little you know as compared to what there is still left to know, but the fact that you’ve got such talent and skill and the ability to memorize every note of a 42 minute symphony, or a “Rhapsody in Blue,” for example, it’s just remarkable and it speaks so much to your stature as a musician and as a human being.
Marcus:
Well, thank you. I appreciate that, and I would say that as long as we are humble in, basically, have something that you’re in touch with that you truly respect that’s greater than you, I tell young people all the time, find something to believe in that represents, like, longer than the time you’ve been here on the planet, because if you don’t, you’re gonna be stuck with your own selfish and frankly varied day to day emotional state, which could lead you into very dangerous decisions. The purpose of history, the purpose of culture, is so that we can study what the masters figured out! We don’t have to figure everything out, you know? Like if I really wanna learn how to play a solo with space, without cluttering everything up, all I’ve gotta do is listen to Thelonius Monk’s music for about an hour. He figured it out, you know? If you want virtuosity, well, listen to Art Tatum for five seconds. I remember the first time I heard Tatum, my teacher put on Art Tatum for the first time, playing piano, and I remember at the end of it I said, oh, I’m not impressed with that, two people should be able to do that. And he was like, uh, that’s not two people, that’s one person. So I almost quit after I heard that, I was like what? And then he played Vladimir Horowitz, playing a Moskovsky etude, I don’t know what key it was in, might have been F major, but anyway, he just blew my mind, and that was his way of letting me know, you’ve got a long way to go, son, you sound okay, but if you really want to know what the holy grail is, these two are probably it, and there are a bunch of other great pianists. I was in Japan a few years ago, working with Seiji Ozawa, great conductor of the Boston Symphony for years and years, and now he’s in Japan, Martha Argerich, and I have her debut recital at Carnegie Hall, and I mean, it’s unbelievable, but they were playing Beethoven, and I went to two rehearsals, and I went to the show that they did, and that lady wasn’t approaching even the idea of playing a wrong note. You couldn’t believe it, but it wasn’t even like an issue of linking of it. Like every single note she played was 100% perfect, the dynamics were exquisite, the sound she got on the piano, I had never heard anything like it, and see, that’s when you learn, that’s the one drawback of being a performer, you don’t really get to hear other musicians display what they’ve figured out about music. Those rare occasions where you can do that, like I got a chance, one of my idols, Ahmad Jamal, the great Ahmad Jamal, who after Nat Cole, to me, him and Oscar Peterson, as far as jazz trio playing, and I remember Ahmad Jamal at an intermission of a show where he just was playing the keys off the piano, and of course I called him Mr. Jamal, see, again, this is old school, you know? I would never call him Ahmad, are you kidding me? And we were talking, and I was telling him all the stuff I was gonna create, and dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, and he says, well, he said it far more eloquently than I can remember and restate, but he said, well, we don’t really create anything. He says the only thing as artists that we can do is discover things. He said, so as long as you’re discovering things, art will remain something you want to investigate. So I was like, yes sir. So those few moments when you can really talk to a master and have them enlighten you, that’s why it is important to have people you look up to.
Jeff:
Yeah. And in the blindness world you mentioned it earlier, you have some who are, you know, basically new to blindness and then you have captured Kilimanjaro, and you know, the elitists, and people think of oh, there are always elitists, of course there are always some people who strive to do something that’s well beyond the reach of the expectations, your parents must have had high expectations to get you to the school and to keep you accountable. Who was your biggest mentor, your biggest advocate, you know, to keep you in the frame of mind of keeping that high expectation, not to hang out with people who were gonna pull you down but to surround yourself with people who encourage?
Marcus:
Right. Well, I would definitely say that, yeah, that would be my parents, you know, both of them, and my older brother as well, Eugene, you know. They always supported everything I did. It’s a weird thing, when I came on the road for the first time, I could tell like a lot of the people that I was meeting, that they were looking for something in music that they didn’t have in their life. I have to say, I was fortunate to not be doing it for that reason. I wasn’t looking for anything, you know? And I think a lot of times we are searching for things. Now, I will say I was a lot more uptight talking about my blindness back then, and I don’t know if it was like I was ashamed of it, or I just didn’t want people to judge me based on it, or what, but I was probably in my mid-30s at the point where I was really comfortable discussing that, which looking back I would call not a mistake, but I would have discussed it a lot more openly and directly if I had it to do over. The mentors, they’re kind of few and far between, but I’ve had a lot of good people, right, that I knew and that I respected and that I certainly admired. I can’t say that there was a particular person that was more influential than my family was.
Jeff:
That’s great.
[Jazz piano riff]
Marcus:
When I went to Florida School for the Blind, I mean, they had top people with masters’ in rehabilitation and mobility, and training, and all that, so I was really lucky, and I honestly don’t know what’s happening there now, I mean I went there, when I did the 60 minutes program, the kids were really nice but now they’ve got more multi-handicapped children, you’ve got to know a whole lot, but the kids were beautiful, I mean, I had a kid jump up there on the piano with me and play, that’s what you’ve gotta do, and I’m hoping I can do more of that kind of stuff.
Pete:
Did you spend a lot of time or any time for that matter with Ray Charles? Because he went to FSDB.
Marcus:
I never got a chance to hang out with Ray, he did, but Stevie I know some, I wouldn’t claim to be his best friend or anything, but we know each other and we keep toying with the idea of perhaps doing a project or something, and he always says he wants to do it and I’m like, well, Stevie, that’s up to you, you’re the big star, okay, I’m- if you want me to do something, you just let me know.
Jeff:
Say when.
Marcus:
But I never knew Ray, and I think, now, David Pinto gave him a bunch of lessons about Sebelius at that time, right before he died, he worked on it for like a year, and he did a presentation where he literally wrote an arrangement and the band played it in like an hour and a half. I mean, he was a genius. I wish I could have talked to him and gotten to know him, because I think when you’ve gone through the school of hard knocks the way he did, he probably would have told me some stuff, probably not in the way I wanted to hear it, but I think he would have given me a lot of really good information.
Jeff:
Yeah, planted some seeds.
Marcus:
Oh, absolutely. And here’s another thing about Ray, and it’s weird because I didn’t really get into his music until later, like I said, like most blind kids, we were all into Stevie, and I didn’t really like Ray Charles when I was a kid. And then I grew up and started becoming a little more sophisticated and really understood what music was, and then I was like oh my goodness, you wanna talk about folk, right, you wanna talk about somebody who has the essence of America in his sound, all the rock guys, Springsteen, like, Ray Charles is who they’re trying to get to. He really was a genius of nuance, is what I would call it, you know, and he played saxophone and was just a wild character of course, in general, so again, he’s another one that is authentic, like what you see is who he is, and he’s very unapologetic about it, but yeah, I never got to…I remember one time I asked Stevie, I said well, is there any chance that me, you, and him could do a record? He said, uh, you don’t understand. He said first of all, it would have to be Ray’s record. Now, we could be on it. And this is Stevie Wonder saying that. He was like oh, you, no. He’s talking to like a naive kid or something, like you don’t understand.
Jeff:
There’s another guy, I don’t know if this transfers over, but James Brown.
Marcus:
Uh-huh.
Jeff:
On the one.
Marcus:
Oh, yes. On the one.
Jeff:
His songs, they start out just, boom.
Marcus:
Yeah they do. But he always believed, and you know, I believe in that too, beat one is the important beat, as long I know where I am on beat one, I’m cool. I could be playing the craziest stuff, but if I know generally where one is, we’re good. But if I lose track of that, well, I don’t know, it’s gonna become very interesting real quick.
Pete:
Find your way back.
Marcus:
When I first started doing “Rhapsody in Blue,” with conductors, they were terrified, because I couldn’t look at them, right, and they had to trust when I told them, well, when I play this cue, you bring the orchestra in four measures later, but eventually it got to the point where I had a reputation where when he tells you that, that is exactly what he’s gonna do, because they get frightened because we play real jazz, it’s the real thing. And so they try to figure out, well, how are we gonna know when he’s done with this cadenza? And I’m like, no, I’m gonna play these four measures from measure 122 through 125, okay, that’s what we’re gonna play, and you’re measure 126. After a while, they develop that trust. And then some of them, they didn’t really respect it, they thought it was just gonna be like, I don’t know, like night of the pops or something, and then when we start playing that stuff, they’re like, oh, no, what, that’s not on the record you sent, no–
Pete:
But it’s still within the same framework. There’s a structure to it.
Marcus:
Exactly. You hit it. So, anyway. But we’ll get more into that the next time we have a podcast.
Pete:
We’ll pick up.
Jeff:
The Marcus Show with Stevie on it. I like it.
[jazz music plays]
Pete:
Marcus, I’ve heard you referred to as the J-Master. Talk about that, where does that handle come from?
Marcus:
Oh, well, the quick story, when I joined Wynton Marsalis’s band in 1985, which dates me for all of you young’uns out there, we would go out on gigs and I to this day don’t really know why they were using this term, I think it just had to do with jazz, like, so if somebody had a great night, if they played really well, they would say you were J-ing, you were j-ing, like you were jazzing it up, right? And I had wanted to play jazz music so bad for so long, like since college, the first week of shows that we did, I don’t know, I played whatever I heard, whatever I heard, I played it. I didn’t think about it, I didn’t worry about it, and so I think those first couple of weeks were pretty impressive to them. I was really just supposed to be out there for a couple of weeks, you know, kind of as a trial or something like that, but after a couple of weeks, you know, they say yeah, you were j-ing again, you know, and then finally they just started calling me J, and then the J-Master, and I was like what? Okay, alright. And I’m kind of proud of it, because it’s a, you know, kind of a statement of achievement, because again, you know, in the end you’re a blind guy dealing with sighted people. I remember the first rehearsal that I had with Marsalis, years and years ago at his house, and we were working on this tune of his called “Black Codes (From the Underground)” and you know, it has an introduction in 5/4 time and all this craziness, you know, and I was messing it up, and it was just me and him, we were just rehearsing, I was messing it up, and he says man, you messing that up, your rhythm is messed up, and then he goes, is that because you’re blind? Is that it? He says, I don’t know, Stevie’s got good rhythm. And I said, I’m just messing it up, okay, can we try it again? I mean, disabilities are mysterious to people, they have no clue how you do what you do. A lot of it just has to do with, it’s a lot of painstaking, backbreaking work, where 80% of what you try to do doesn’t work, and you finally find the 20% that has the exact right steps in the exact right order, and it works. And eventually technology gets to the point where even if you make a few mistakes it’s easy to correct them and you can still get it done, but a lot of the achievement that’s happened in the blind community as far as technologies, a lot of it’s been like folks like you guys who are doing these 101 podcasts explaining to people, this is how you can do this, and you have it really clear, easy to digest, you’re not rushing through it, but at the same time you’re like, well, fasten your seatbelt, we are getting ready to do this. And I think that is the kind of community stuff that I’m talking about, that I would love to see more actual interaction between a lot of us as we do those things, because it’s quite a thing when you see the effort that people are putting into all these podcasts and explaining things from a blindness perspective. It makes me proud. I didn’t know, as a young guy, that there were all these other blind guys out here doing all this stuff, I had no idea, you know, I was in a different industry, I guess, and just wasn’t running into a lot of people who were doing all this great work that’s going on, so I hope I get a chance to spend more time getting to know some of the blind folks that are doing stuff, and hopefully we can all get together and encourage these young people and kind of mentor and support them, even if it’s 15 minutes here, half an hour there, a podcast where we’re all talking about what the young people should do and what they are doing, and that’s the important work that I see you guys doing.
Pete:
Thank you.
Jeff:
Well, I think your voice is another instrument. You’ve put together such great thoughts and your experience and everything, through blindness and musicians, and in my upbringing, jazz was that thing out there, you just brought it in, you know, when you did the little blues riff there, with jazz, the folk.
Pete:
The folk.
Marcus:
Exactly, yeah.
Jeff:
You brought it together, you brought it- and now, here, I’m talking to the J-Master, and you’re a normal guy, with experiences-
Marcus:
Absolutely, normal experiences, I’m looking forward to football season, I’m a Las Vegas Raiders fan, I’m gonna wait and see what Derek Carr is gonna do. You know, you do have to get away from it, because music really can consume you, okay, it’s insane. It doesn’t care. It’s like a black hole, or a rabbit hole, you can just get so deep in it, and you have to come out and do regular things, you know, I used to love to play Monopoly, right, and then again, you play with sighted people and we’d be playing Monopoly and they’d be like on New York Avenue and they’d roll a seven, I’d be like okay, Atlantic, they’d be like what? And then they’d count up seven and they’d be like yeah, that’s Atlantic, how do you know that? And I’d say well, you just went from spot 19 to spot 26, come on, it’s not that-
Jeff:
The board hasn’t changed.
Marcus:
It hasn’t changed in 50 years!
Pete:
Whole lot simpler than Beethoven’s 9th.
Marcus:
Oh, God, well, that’s for sure. And the thing that intrigues me about him real quick, Beethoven was never the best at any one thing in classical music, like he was not the great writer of melody that Chopin was, he really wasn’t the great orchestrator that Rimsky-Korsakov was, but somehow when he put everything together, he had something the Leonard Bernstein used to call a sense of musical inevitability, meaning that when you hear Moonlight Sonata- [snippet of Moonlight Sonata plays] it’s almost like you get the feeling that- [Moonlight Sonata plays] the notes that you’re hearing are the only ones that could have been chosen in that order.
Jeff:
Oh, yeah.
Marcus:
You don’t get the sense that you could have done anything other than what he did. The combination of all of those elements of style that he has in his compositional process are what make him arguably the greatest composer, and again, that’s another thing that me and Wynton used to argue about-
[Jazz music plays]
Pete:
You wrote a song and I heard it last night and I was laughing out loud, “Oh No, How Could You?”
Marcus:
Oh, yeah, “Oh No, How Could You?”
Pete:
The 12-piece from Florida State was playing it. The intro was hysterical, can you talk a little bit about that?
Marcus:
Oh, real quick! Yeah, yeah, that’s our baritone player Tissa Koslo [sp?] and Ricardo Pascal, who plays soprano in that. What it is, I wrote this crazy part for the baritone, and he represents the male who’s been busted doing something that he wasn’t supposed to do with a girl he wasn’t supposed to know. Ricardo, he represents the female, the soprano, who’s basically saying that was you, I saw it, and then at a certain point they play together, you know, and you have the low part of it-
[low excerpt from “Oh No, How Could You?” plays]
Pete:
Kinda chaotic-
Marcus:
You know, this crazy stuff, and the female, she’s like yelling at him, la da ladadida-
[high excerpt from “Oh No, How Could You?” plays]
Marcus:
-and you know, she’s like no, you know, I don’t wanna hear that, but then eventually they work it out, and it resolves into just a regular B flat major blues, and there’s a bass solo-
[bass solo excerpt from “Oh No, How Could You?” plays]
Marcus:
-and then, you know, you can hear that everything’s probably gonna work out, ‘cause everything’s slower, it’s a little more mellow, it’s a little more stable, and [unintelligible] just kind of playing blues at that point, so that’s “Oh No, How Could You?”
Pete:
Thanks.
Jeff:
I am really impressed with this interview, I didn’t know what I was- some jazz guy, you know, blah blah blah.
Marcus:
[Laughing] Right right right, I hear you.
Jeff:
I guess I’m just trying to say in my world right here-
Marcus:
I love blues, I’ve always loved playing blues, you know? I have to tell you, when I first started playing jazz, even in Wynton’s group, they weren’t playing blues, I remember telling them, I said, we’re playing all this abstract stuff, it was cool, I said yeah, but people are not gonna know what that is. Where’s the blues, are we gonna do any of that? Because the blues, at the end of the day, is two things: it’s a life circumstance, meaning anything bad that you didn’t need that happened, losing your sight, somebody stole your car, your woman wasn’t where she was supposed to be, whatever it might be, but it’s something that you don’t want, and it happened anyhow, right? But in music, we play the blues to heal the blues. That’s the thing. And when you hear a musician play blues, from any genre, they make you feel better even though the words are crazy. But when you hear somebody actually play with a real pulse and a real rhythm-
[bluesy piano riff plays]
Pete:
Sounds like we’ve got our intro music, Jeff.
Jeff:
That is awesome, it’s just- I’m gonna have to call you Mr. Roberts from now on.
Pete:
I know.
Marcus:
Uh-oh!
Pete:
That was folk, that was feel-good.
Marcus:
Absolutely, and honestly, if there’s anything wrong with jazz, that’s what’s wrong with it. If you hear it and you don’t like it, that’s probably why.
Jeff:
Well, Marcus Roberts, I just want to thank you so much for taking the time. You have so many messages in here that people can draw from, I really like what you mentioned about don’t put people on statues, put the idea, you know? Display that, because people are vulnerable
Marcus:
I’m with you. I’ve always wanted to do this podcast, man, I’m not gonna lie, so I appreciate you all calling me, and I absolutely, seriously, enjoy the work, and believe me, I know about a production, it’s work.
Pete:
The J-Master.
Jeff:
The J-Master. Thank you very much.
Pete:
Marcus, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for coming on with us.
Marcus:
My pleasure.
Pete:
Jeff and I want to thank Marcus Roberts for joining us in the Blind Abilities studio today, and for sharing his unique insights into jazz music as well as the blindness community. We hope you’ve appreciated his astounding musical talents, and be sure to check out his website at www.marcusroberts.com. You can find much of his music on his YouTube channel, and of course, on all of the available streaming services.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Jeff:
For more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities, download our app from the app store, Blind Abilities, that’s two words, or send us an email at info@blindabilities.com. Thanks for listening.
Contact Your State Services
If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
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