The Entertainer & The J Master

The story of how my love of ragtime led to me meeting Marcus Roberts.

One of the hallmarks of childhood is impatience. One of the great difficulties a young child first learns is to learn how to wait. Time ticks by impossibly slow. When I was young, one of the things I loved to do was to peek in the back of the book of music I was learning from to see what music I could look forward to. Maybe I could even try and cheat and learn something I wasn’t supposed to. This is how I advanced so fast on the violin, learning all the Suzuki violin songs in my spare time.

On the piano, I thought I could do the same, but my piano teacher Ms. Emine wasn’t having it. She would not allow the shortcuts I would try to take. She wanted me to learn things for a reason. Not for the sake of learning them. When I first started taking lessons with her, she started me in an adult’s beginners book. I was surprised when I inquired about a song in the book and she didn’t dismiss it out of hand.

The very last song in the book was a simple arrangement of “The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin. It was one thing to see a song in this book with an actual composer’s name at the top of it, that wasn’t something like “Ode to Joy”. It looked like an actual piece! It was another for this to be a black composer such as Joplin. I had a rudimentary enough knowledge of Joplin to know that he was important and that his music was foundational to jazz, but until this point, I didn’t really know much else about his music.

It was through “The Entertainer” that a whole world of piano would open up to me. My teacher, Ms. Emine would help foster this curiosity I had by helping to develop a child-friendly reduction of Joplin’s original composition, that had reaches far greater than my small hands could stretch. She would also do the same for the song “Maple Leaf Rag”, a song she worked with me on in various forms, as I developed as a pianist. She treated these songs with the same eye for precision, good form, and technique as she would with any classical piece.

Around this time, I was hungry to find anything I could relating to Scott Joplin whether it be books of sheet music, or recordings. Many of these recordings though were mechanic reproductions of either Joplin’s playing or had the sheet music programed into a piano roll for player pianos. Beyond the piano roll recordings of ragtime, we would find in the “ragtime” section of certain music stores, I came across a “living”, “breathing” version of the song unlike anything I had heard before.

While perusing my father’s vast CD collection (a collection I would become intimately familiar with after being tasked to arrange it alphabetically multiple times throughout my childhood), I came across Marcus Roberts’ album The Joy of Joplin whose opening song was none other than “The Entertainer”.

I was enthralled by this album. Not only was it solo jazz piano, but it was also solo piano that wasn’t confined to the prison of a piano roll! For me at the time, solo jazz piano was a hard find. Most jazz piano I had heard was in the context of an ensemble, where the piano was limited to a role. And when piano was allowed to shine, I rarely ever heard it with a left hand as proficient as the right. Not only was Marcus Roberts’ left-handed piano playing as proficient as his right, it was far greater than any piano playing I had heard!

Thus began my obsession with Marcus Roberts aka The J Master. I quickly went from album to album, learning with it, the whole history of jazz piano, from Scott Joplin to Jelly Roll Morton, to Thelonious Monk and beyond. Whenever I’d go to concerts and would get the opportunity to talk to musicians, I’d ask them if they knew Marcus Roberts. I got an amazing feeling of FOMO when it became apparent to me that seemingly everyone knew J Master but me!

Impatience would soon set in once again! But unfortunately there is no book of life that you can peek into the back of in order to see what will eventually happen. I would get assurances from that the time would soon come. “Just wait until he comes to New York.” I was told. But for a child that answer was as good as the “we’ll tell you when you’re older” response that is a part of every parents’ repertoire of responses. The time required could have just been a few months, or a year, but to a 9 year old, that equated to an unacceptably large fraction of my life!

Well, the time did come, and it was sooner than anticipated. The word had finally gotten around to him that there was a little kid in New York asking about him and on one fateful night at the Village Vanguard, I finally got my wish. My dad took me and my sister Kennedy to see the J Master himself and we had seats right next to the piano. According to my dad, I was smiling from ear to ear all night while I got to see the J Master’s playing up front and center!

In that moment, my life was complete. I got to see and meet my favorite pianist. But, as I would come to understand, that night wasn’t a destination. It was a doorway. Like most children first stepping into a lifelong endeavor that something like music can become, I didn’t yet realize how much more lay ahead. Thankfully, Marcus Roberts would soon become one of my mentors, one of the role models I was blessed to learn from as I developed as a musician.