One Of America's Greatest Jazz Pianists, Marcus Roberts, Feels The Bern

Marcus Roberts is a jazz pianist and composer. And he's blind. He is self-taught but went to the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, where Ray Charles also studied (much earlier). Wynton Marsalis, with whom he toured, called him the "greatest American musician most people have never heard of." Ryan Lizza, writing for the New Yorker this week, broke the news that Roberts, who is also an eloquent teacher, has written songs about four of the presidential candidates, in an effort to show that art has a place in politics. He's releasing an EP, Race for the White House featuring one song each about Bernie ("Feel the Bern," which you can listen to above), Hillary ("It's My Turn"), Herr Trumpf ("Making America Great Again-- All By Myself") and Dr. Ben ("I Did Chop Down That Cherry Tree").

"Feel the Bern," according to Roberts, is meant to "show the different components of Bernie Sanders’s personality. When the piano does it, it’s laid-back and it’s kind of cool and dignified. When the tenor plays it, it starts to get a little more rambunctious. You know, maybe that’s when he tells Hillary, 'I don’t really give a damn about hearing about your e-mails anymore.' It becomes kind of aggressive, and there’s a lot of fire, like, we’re going to get to this. I think that’s why Sanders appeals to young people."

“It’s My Turn” is slower and mellower than “Feel the Bern,” and it attempts to describe the many phases of Clinton’s long career in politics. “We know that she’s undergone a whole lot of changes,” Roberts said. A Clinton supporter, he was originally going to call the song “I Guess I’m Just Overqualified,” but he decided to keep the music as nonpartisan as possible. “People have been messing with the lady for twenty-five years about this and that, so I decided we’ve definitely got to have some changes,” he said, noting that, of the four songs, it is the most complicated and nuanced, just like her campaign. “We start in D-flat minor, but we change to G-flat and then to B-flat, and we change the meter and the tempo.”

Roberts said that he wrote the songs fast, attempting to capture the candidates based on what was happening in debates and on the campaign trail at the time. “I was focussed on something that was literally occurring even as I was writing it,” he said. “I’m listening to Ben Carson on TV, and he’s talking slow. I’m thinking, well, the piece for him can’t be up-tempo.” The Carson song was written at the stage in the campaign when Trump, feeling threatened by Carson’s candidacy, had attacked Carson for some bizarre anecdotes from his opponent’s memoir.

“Carson’s telling people he did all this lawless stuff as a kid,” Roberts said. “I’m like, how can I capture that?” Jason Marsalis’s initial drumming on the song didn’t sound quite right to Roberts. “I said, ‘No, man, I need it to sound like it’s a hammer hitting something, O.K.? I need it to sound like he might be beating up one of his friends at school. It needs to sound that way.’ ” They accomplished the musical equivalent of Carson’s hammer attack with a three-beat rim shot.

Trump’s was the easiest personality to capture. “It was clear that it needed to be bold and up-front and egotistical,” Roberts said. He told Marsalis to whistle as if he were Trump surveying his vast real-estate empire from up high. “You’re rich, you’ve got pretty much everything anybody could want, and you’re just chilling,” Roberts said. A trumpet cuts in on the whistling, to show Trump’s more aggressive and cocksure side. “He interrupts himself,” Roberts explained, “almost to say, ‘I’m going to get all this great stuff done, I don’t need any help, I know what I need to do, just get out of my way and let me do it.’ It almost has a Batman-superhero vibe to it.”

You Want Bipartisan? The Whole House Gets Together On Miles Davis

On Tuesday afternoon the House voted 409-zip in favor of John Conyers' H RES 894 to honor the 50th anniversary of the recording of the album Kind of Blue and reaffirming jazz as a national treasure-- even die-hard obstructionists who vote against everything like Virginia Foxx, Paul Broun and Mike Pence going along for the ride!

No doubt in my mind that Conyers is a big Miles Davis fan. Virginia Foxx... I hope Mike Stark asks her next time she's scurrying away from his camera on Capitol Hill and screeching for the police. (And don't cop out by saying Foxx might have voted for it because she's a well-known John Coltrane afficianado. That's got to be a different Coltrane.)

Quadruple platinum, Kind of Blue is the best-selling jazz album of all time and is often cited by musicians of all genres as a powerful impact. Maybe the fact that Duane Allman said it influenced his playing is what got to Foxx. She may have even though Davis was an Allman Brother for all I know. Mike Pence, of course, was impressed by how much Kind of Blue influenced the opening chords of "Breathe" from Dark Side of the Moon. Anyway, Congress did good today. Now if they can just keep from getting railroaded by the Senate on the public option!

Choices: Terence Blanchard With Dr. Cornel West And Bilal

If you're a jazz fan, you already know about Terence Blanchard, probably as a bandleader, possibly for his work with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. He has a new album coming out in about 2 weeks, Choices that is probably his most fascinating work to date. And I'm saying that as a huge fan of his Grammy winning Requiem for Katrina from 2007, A Tale of God's Will , the project he did with Spike Lee for the HBO documentary When the Levees Broke.

He collaborated with activist Cornel West and singer Bilal on the new project. “When the spoken word idea came to mind, Dr. Cornel West was the first person I thought of.  I’ve always been a fan of his philosophy-- the stances he’s taken and the causes that he has championed throughout his career-- and I thought what better person could I find to put a lot of these ideas into words that can work in this particular musical situation.  Bilal on the other hand is a great vocalist and while recognized more as an R&B soul singer, he is a huge fan of Jazz and is very knowledgeable when it comes to the history of music."

West, who is a distinguished professor at Princeton, is best known for work that fuses civil rights and anti-war activism with a powerful moral and even religious social critique. Long a hero of progressives, he got into a much-publicized fracas with obtuse corporate shill Lawrence Summers, then serving, inexplicably, as president of Harvard. Asked about his collaboration with Blanchard, West defined Choices as being about "what kind of human being you’re going to be.  How are you going to opt for a life of decency and compassion and service and love. What goes into that kind of choice. That’s the human challenge. To be part of this album is an unadulterated joy because no doubt about it, music for me is continuous of life-- to be able to live the kind of life that I live on the certain kind of Socratic calling of raising
unsettling questions. To be able to be in conversation and on an album with Terence Blanchard, that’s serious business... I mean, that’s... that’s a beautiful thing.” 

The CD hits the stores August 18th-- on Norman Lear's Concord label. Meanwhile below is the first of 5 "webisodes" on the making of album-- "Terence TV." It'll give you a little hint of what's coming up.