Grand Pianist

Marcus Roberts comes on stage with cautious steps, moving carefully, one hand on the arm of a companion. Tall, slender, stylishly dressed in suit and tie, wearing dark eyeglasses and a trim mustache, he has an elegant, self-possessed quality that belies the hesitancy of his deliberate physical movement.

Once Roberts reaches the keyboard of a grand piano placed at stage center, however, he suddenly is in full command of his environment. Carefully adjusting the level of his bench, he caresses the keys gently, almost affectionately, without producing a sound. Then, after pausing for a few deep breaths, he smiles and says, “I’m not sure what I’m going to play, but I promise you it won’t be anything I can’t do.”

And it seems, these days, as though there is very little that Roberts can’t do. He has not one, but two albums in current release: “Portraits in Blue” (Sony Classical) and “Time and Circumstance” (Columbia). The former includes Roberts’ versions--with orchestra and small jazz band--of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and “ ‘I Got Rhythm’ Variations” and James P. Johnson’s “Yamekraw.” The latter is a kind of extended suite for jazz trio chronicling the passages of a love relationship.

Roberts appears at the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Friday night and the Plummer Auditorium in Fullerton on Saturday, where he will perform as a soloist, with his nine-piece ensemble, and--in the program’s centerpiece--showcase his new rendering of “Rhapsody in Blue.”

And why is Roberts so busy?

“Well,” he said, “when people ask me, ‘Marcus, what do you do?’ I say, ‘I present the piano.’ I love every aspect of the instrument. I like to accompany, I like to play solo and trio, I like to play septet, I like to play with an orchestra.

“So I guess you could say I’ve got the Wynton Marsalis philosophy: Document as much as you can. Put what you’ve got in front of the people, give them the chance to check it out and decide what they think.”

There’s no doubt that Roberts, 33, has been doing precisely that, pursuing Marsalis’ renaissance man approach to jazz. He was 22 when he first joined the Marsalis band, and he won first prize in the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition at 25. After leaving Marsalis, Roberts--whom Marsalis has playfully nicknamed the “J Master”--recorded “The Truth Is Spoken Here,” “Deep in the Shed,” “Alone With Three Giants” (a tribute to Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton) and “If I Could Be With You,” all for Novus, as well as some work for Columbia, including his debut album, “Gershwin for Lovers.” Despite this rapid-fire rate of production, the quality of his releases was good enough make him the first musician to have his first three recordings reach No. 1 on Billboard’s traditional jazz chart.

It’s been a remarkable pace for a player who, despite his extraordinary abilities, still must work by memory and by rote, using Braille to write music and a computer to expand his compositional capacities. But his blindness has never stood in the way of his talent.

Perhaps the best testimony to Roberts’ ability to successfully manage what he calls the challenges of blindness is the continuing expansion in his creative activities--most recently, his large-scale reexamination of “Rhapsody.” Although the piece, which was composed in 1924, has been performed in a variety of instrumentations and adaptations, it has never received a reading that goes to its jazz roots.

In Roberts’ version, for example, the trademark opening clarinet cadenza is momentarily delayed in favor of a brief, scene-setting banjo passage. Piano cadenzas are completely improvised, and other sections of the piece have been opened up to allow for soloing by the members of Roberts’ nonet, an impressively talented ensemble that includes players such as trumpeter Marcus Printup, trombonist Ronald Westrae and drummer Jason Marsalis (the youngest of the gifted Marsalis jazz clan).

“I didn’t know when we first started working on it that I would make as many changes as I did,” said Roberts. “I knew I wanted some improvising by the musicians, and I knew that all the solo cadenzas would be improvised.”

Once he was in the studio with the musicians, the project moved well beyond those original plans.

“We were working on this one section,” he recalled, “and we put a swing groove on it, which led to us adding more and more things. Finally we just decided, what the hell, we’ll just improvise on it. And the crazy thing is that the harmonic progression that Gershwin put into the middle section is like the blues--which is at the core of what the ‘Rhapsody’ is all about.”

Does he have any reservations about making such drastic revisions in a much-loved and extremely familiar work?

“I wanted to make it clear that this was an American perspective on an American piece,” he said. “I mean, look. The real influence of jazz music hadn’t taken hold of the country yet, even though Gershwin was on to it when he wrote the ‘Rhapsody.’ So we’re trying to put the true American rhythm in the piece, to do what we think Gershwin would have wanted to do if, say, he’d had the chance to hear Louis Armstrong, and if he’d had a chance to experience the notion of swing as a musical agenda.” (Which Gershwin actually may have done, since Armstrong’s first recordings--with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band--were made in 1923, a year before the “Rhapsody” was premiered by bandleader Paul Whiteman in a concert at New York’s Aeolian Hall.)

Roberts likes to think that Gershwin would respond favorably to his “Rhapsody,” because he believes it taps into the composition’s “folk essence”--”the simple, the basic, the fundamental--the core of the culture, even the identity of the culture. In the case of the ‘Rhapsody,’ it’s jazz and the blues.

“Every jazz version of a song is like life itself: Every day of your life is a different day. You can know what you’ve planned to do, but something’s going to come up to throw a twist into it. So you have to work to spontaneously impose logic on a chaotic environment.”

Roberts’ road to that depth of musical understanding has been productive almost from the beginning. Born Marthaniel Roberts on Aug. 7, 1963, in Jacksonville, Fla., he has been blind since cataracts destroyed his vision at age 4. Despite this, he came to music quickly, studying saxophone first, then piano. (“It was clear pretty early,” he says, “that piano was the instrument.”) His mother, a gospel singer, gave constant encouragement. His parents bought him a piano when he was 8.

Roberts used Braille music and extensive memorization, but the procedures did not deter him from studying music at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he began to receive wide notice when he won several state music competitions. In 1982, he won first place in the music competition at the National Assn. of Jazz Educators’ annual convention in Chicago.

It was here that he was heard by Marsalis and promptly was offered a job in the trumpeter’s rhythm section. But all was not rosy in the first stages of their relationship. Looking back, Roberts chuckles as he recalls an encounter when he was having problems performing Marsalis’ demanding arrangements.

“I was really messing one of his pieces,” says Roberts with a grin, “and Wynton wasn’t too happy about it. He’d never been around blind people, and he’d say, ‘Aw, man, you’re messing up my music. Maybe it’s because you’re blind.’

“And I told him, ‘Man, I actually wish that were true, but, no, I’m just messing it up.’ He thought about that for a minute, and then he laughed and came back with, ‘Yeah, that’s right. Stevie Wonder has good rhythm, so you just must be messing up my music.’

“It was working through all that stuff, and him having that level of faith with my artistic ability that had a whole lot to do with helping me deal with the problems I encountered out on the road.”

Roberts’ upbeat outlook undoubtedly has affected the manner in which he perceives his blindness.

“All the dysfunctions in one’s life can have a negative effect,” he says. “Or you can apply the principle of reaffirmation in the face of adversity to use these dysfunctions as a steppingstone to creating a successful environment.”

But Roberts is also quick to underscore what he views as a real frustration: “It’s that you don’t have control of your physical environment. And you don’t have access to visual cues to know what your options are. Maybe most important of all, you’re in a position where it’s publicly possible for people to know that your dysfunction exists.

“If somebody has a problem with alcohol, or has a family tragedy, you don’t necessarily know about it from looking at them. When you’re blind, people know it.”

Roberts is further bothered by the patronizing attitude that suggests that some disabilities--blindness in a musician, for one--carry with them certain benefits in the form of some sort of intensified capacity to concentrate.

“Well, it’s certainly true that when you can’t see, all you have is what you can hear,” he replies, “but trust me, the greatest musicians have not been blind people, so we know that talent is not about blindness.

“The truth is that everybody has a set of life circumstances and issues which, if not addressed, are going to cause a rough time. So my attitude toward my blindness has been similar to the way I try to I deal with other problems--go forward, deal with the problem in a positive way, and not use it as a crutch or an excuse.”

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“Portraits in Blue,” Marcus Roberts, his jazz ensemble and the Academy of the Ascension, conducted by Robert Sadin. Friday, 8 p.m.: Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale; $22.50 to $29.50; (800) 414-ALEX. Saturday, 8 p.m.: Plummer Auditorium, 201 E. Chapman Ave., Fullerton; $10 to $30; (714) 553-2422.