Marcus Roberts: Jazz Piano And Technology's Promise

Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on pianist Marcus Roberts.

Roberts plays jazz piano like he's lived through its entire history. His style pulls from Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller as much as it does from bebop. He spent years in Wynton Marsalis' band, has performed piano concertos with Seiji Ozawa, and today leads The Modern Jazz Generation, a 12-piece ensemble encompassing three decades of musicians.

Roberts is here today to talk about something beyond performance. He's one of twenty artists awarded a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation's Performing Arts Technologies Lab. His project tackles a technical problem that's plagued remote music collaboration: latency. He's working to get the delay below 40 milliseconds so musicians in different cities can actually play together in real time.

Roberts has been blind since age five, and he's used technology his whole life to access music and create it. From Braille music notation to AI-powered tools, he shows us how tech can serve artists rather than replace them. And that's just a hint of where this conversation goes.