Music: Cooking At The Keys

They were not really epiphanies. The way he tells it, Marcus Roberts’ decisive moments of musical inspiration — those times when you hear a tune and your whole life changes — were more like . . . bumps. No epic moments. Just a few small occasions of collision.

The first one — the seminal one — happened when Roberts was eight, and he collided with a new piano in his home in Jacksonville. He had been blind for four years, and was not so much startled as seduced. “I sat right down,” Marcus says, in his soft but insistent voice. “I thought, ‘This, apparently, is for me. I could work on this all day.’ “

A bit shy of two decades later, Roberts, 25, finds himself with an album that has climbed to the top of the Billboard jazz chart. The Truth Is Spoken Here is a dexterous and loving homage, “a tribute,” Roberts says, “to the artists who were the masters of the form.” There are two Ellington compositions, In a Mellow Tone and a supernal rendition of Single Petal of a Rose, and a version of Thelonious Monk’s classic Blue Monk that Roberts brings off with such light witchery that the song sounds reborn. Truth (which also boasts five Roberts originals) has all the well-studied funk of the new jazz as performed by the likes of Wynton Marsalis.

This is no coincidence. For the past four years, Roberts has been Marsalis’ man on piano for both touring and recording. Marsalis plays trumpet on Truth, and his brother Delfeayo produced the album. The result has the righteous precision Marsalis brings to his playing, but this is Roberts’ showcase.

He started noodling around on the piano when he was five, picking out notes when he accompanied his mother and father to church. It was these little improvs that led his parents to buy a piano. Roberts’ mother was a gospel singer, his father a longshoreman, and it was no easy thing to come by money. At first young Marcus taught himself, and after a year he was good enough to play in church. He played with one hand or the other, but still hadn’t figured out how to make both work together. “Horrible hand position,” he remembers. At twelve, he started to take formal lessons in doing what came naturally.

Bump! He was beginning to find his own way. There were other lessons to learn. His teacher played him some Art Tatum. Bump! ” ‘Does he have three hands?’ It was the first time I heard something I couldn’t see myself doing.” He kept on learning and playing. He met Marsalis during his days at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Bump again! Marsalis talked to Roberts about the roots of jazz, challenged him intellectually, encouraged him to develop a philosophy: “Feeling is not fact.” By senior year Marsalis invited Roberts to play a few gigs. Florida State promptly lost a promising music major.

Reticent about his personal life (he still lives in Tallahassee), Roberts is evangelical about jazz. “Children don’t get a chance to hear much jazz,” he says. “If you eat at McDonald’s all your life, then you won’t like broccoli the first time you taste it.” When Roberts is cooking at the keys, though, he serves up jazz that is not only knowledgeable but accessible. Contemporary jazz can be too hip to draw in the listener: the more intrepid the music, the more insistent it seems about sealing itself off. Roberts’ gift is to keep connected to past masters like Monk while extending the music’s possibilities — and its audience — into the future with a light and open hand. Bump!