Marcus Roberts is a very talented -- if very raw -- young musician, whose good fortune it was to capture the attention and goodwill of the all-powerful Wynton Marsalis. Roberts is one of the generation of young African-American jazz musicians who seems bent on forging the future by reinventing the past; his infatuation with older forms renders his music a pastiche of obsolete styles. Roberts is a gifted mimic, though his adoption of his idols' surface mannerisms does not penetrate to the essence of their art.
Roberts is without sight; he attended a school for the blind near his childhood home of Jacksonville, FL. He began playing piano in his youth, and studied the instrument at Florida State University in the mid-'80s.
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