Bryn Roberts moved to New York on Sept. 3. It's the big step that many a young jazz musician dreams of taking. This young jazz musician, a pianist of particular promise, had already gotten his career off to a very good start in Montreal, drawing notice earlier this year with his first CD, the self-produced Present Tense, and finding himself more recently among the five winners of Jazz ID, a national competition sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts in connection with this week's Canadian International Jazz Convention in Toronto.
The events in New York of Sept. 11 were "not the warmest welcome I could have imagined," Roberts admits now, revealing the sort of understatement that also characterizes his piano playing. "My immediate thoughts were that maybe I should rethink my plan. But having been there a while now, I think it should be okay."
The jazz scene has returned to normal -- many of the city's clubs remained dark in the days following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center -- and Roberts is beginning to make the contacts that are so essential to new arrivals.
He has been checking out the intensely competitive jam sessions in Greenwich Village at Small's and uptown at Smoke. More to his liking, he has also started to play privately in musicians' homes and studios around the city. "I'm not so much interested in the traditional, testosterone-driven aspect of jam sessions," he explains from Montreal during a stopover en route to the wedding in Paris of his drummer on Present Tense, Karl Jannuska. "Not that I mind it, or that I'm necessarily intimidated by it, but I think a lot more real music happens at these informal sessions at people's houses.
Coincidentally, several of his friends have also taken up residence in New York of late. Two of the other musicians on his CD, the Winnipeg vibraphonist Stefan Bauer and the Montreal bassist Fraser Hollins, are recent to the city, as are the Montreal saxophonists Christine Jensen and Joel Miller. The fifth musician on the CD, Vancouver tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake, has lived in New York since 1992.
Bauer is a well-travelled veteran, but surely Roberts -- who's 24 -- speaks for the others when he explains the city's attractions. "There are so many more opportunities in New York, the level is so incredibly high, and it's where everyone is based, so I can't understand why any young jazz musician wouldn't want to live there -- apart from the fact that it's incredibly expensive."
On that count, he has the assistance of the Canada Council, specifically a grant to renew his studies with Fred Hersch, the New York pianist whose refined musical sensibilities -- his touch, technique and quiet sense of drama -- have already made their mark on Roberts's playing.
"It's a whole other world of piano playing when you're dealing with Fred. His concept is to divide the piano into different voices, much like Bach, so that you're dealing with multiple voices on the keyboard at the same time -- soprano, alto, tenor, bass -- instead of the Bud Powell style of left-hand 'comping' under right-hand bebop lines. Fred's approach is to put two of those voices in each hand and try to keep the ball rolling with all of them."
This several worlds away from the pop music that Roberts listened to as a teenager in Winnipeg; he was drawn to jazz by saxophonist Branford Marsalis's work with Sting.
It's also worlds away from trumpeter Maynard Ferguson's Big Bop Nouveau, with which Roberts toured in the U.S. and Great Britain during the summer of 2000.
"Basically, I was the wrong guy for the band," he says candidly, of his work with the expatriate Canadian high-noter, one of the great showmen of jazz. "I found it hard to reconcile the difference between working on some Scriabin at home one week and then going to play Birdland with Maynard Ferguson the next."
It's not an experience Roberts regrets, mind you. It has only served to clarify what he wants to do on his own, which is simply "to play as much original music as I can." His debut CD, for example, includes just one melody from the standard jazz repertoire among its eight tracks, the minor Rodgers & Hart classic Spring Is Here, which Roberts has reinvented rhythmically and harmonically.
"I guess it depends on context," he suggests, harking back to an experience of the sort that a young musician could only have in New York.
"I just heard [pianist]Hank Jones at the Iridium, and he was playing standards so beautifully. But it's almost as though I'd rather leave that to guys like him. That's the music of their generation. I love it, but I can't play it the way Hank Jones does."
Quite so. And Roberts's CD, you will recall, is Present Tense -- present, not past.
The Bryn Roberts Quartet appears in Toronto on Friday as part of the Jazz ID showcase at the Canadian International Jazz Convention (Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Exhibition Place). The free concert is open to the public. Roberts also performs in Montreal (on Sunday), Vancouver (Nov. 20), Winnipeg (Nov. 21), Calgary (Nov. 22), Edmonton (Nov. 23) and Saskatoon (Nov. 24).