New World Symphony Swings into Jazz with Marcus Roberts Trio at Arsht

Marcus Roberts and his trio join New World Symphony with guest conductor Andrew Grams in “Rhapsody in Blue” at the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Knight Concert Hall at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 10. (Photo courtesy of New World Symphony)

Jazz, that most American of idioms, has a cozy winter home in Miami, with festivals, series and individual concerts showcasing the expansiveness of a form that is arguably our country’s greatest calling card to the musical world.

Not to be left out of the celebration, on Friday,  Jan. 10, the musicians of the New World Symphony will perform at the Adrienne Arsht Center in a program highlighting jazz greats George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.

Andrew Grams, a dynamic and generous conductor who has led orchestras throughout the United States and who has a penchant for working with young musicians, leaves snowy Cleveland to lead the NWS Fellows in the Strayhorn/Ellington take on Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,” Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige Suite,” Darius Milhaud’s “La Création du Monde,” James P. Johnson’s “Victory Slide” and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The dynamic American conductor Andrew Grams will lead New World Symphony in “Rhapsody in Blue,” a concert exploring the intersections of jazz and classical music in the works of composers like George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. (Photo courtesy of New World Symphony)

Grams’ highlights that his visits to Miami in previous NWS performances have all been between the months of November and February.

“All I can say is that New World symphony has treated me very well,” he says, noting that the temperature in Cleveland at that moment: 27 degrees.

NWS kicks off the evening with the most wintery piece on the program, Strayhorn and Ellington’s reimagined “Nutcracker. And if, as we slouch towards the tail-end of the holiday season, you stand convinced that you would rather eat the last dried-out piece of Aunt Bertha’s fruitcake than partake of yet another “Nutcracker,” you should really give the Strayhorn/Ellington version a taste. With sections like “Toot Toot Tootie Toot” and “The Peanut Brittle Brigade,” it has considerably more rum—and fun—in it than the candied classical version piped through the aisles of shopping malls from Thanksgiving through December. “Sugar Rum Cherry?” Coming right up.

Strayhorn, the Duke’s closest collaborator, once said that “Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is his band.” Under Grams’ baton, will NWS’s Fellows attempt to produce what Strayhorn called “the Ellington Effect”? That was where, with Duke at the helm, his group of highly distinctive, iconoclastic players would blend together to create an utterly original sound, without losing an iota of their individuality.  How does Grams go about getting players schooled in the classical tradition to swing?

New World Symphony offers its Fellows an opportunity to play different styles of music that they may not have experienced in their classical studies, and to perform with a variety of conductors. (Photo by Alex Markow, courtesy of New World Symphony)

Grams says he reminds orchestras that playing jazz “does require the precision and care that we give the canonical music that we go to school to learn…it just requires us to care about things that are almost opposite to what we give a great deal of care to in our normal repertoire.” As Ellington’s band of brilliant oddballs exemplified, the spirit of jazz can never be fully captured by just notes on the page.

According to Grams, the real test of the NWS players’ embrace of the jazz genre will be the “Black, Brown and Beige Suite,” which Ellington wrote in 1941. Its three sections, he said, were meant as “a parallel” to the history of Blacks in America.

“That’s a whole different can of worms,” Grams says, “because it is entirely Ellington using the jazz language by itself,” and it has sent him down various research rabbit holes to suss out the secrets of the precise sound Ellington was aiming for in this ambitious work. Details, for example, such as the type of cymbal legendary drummer Sonny Greer used on the original recordings.

“What size cymbal do they use in order to make that kind of sound, so that it doesn’t just sound like a Pops Orchestra trap set? I mean, it’s a different sound,” he says. “I’m having to research all of these things that I would never have necessarily thought of before. It’s going to be quite interesting to say, ‘Okay, well it’s written this way, but it’s performed by Ellington and his crew this way.’”

The Marcus Roberts Trio, with virtuoso jazz pianist Marcus Roberts, drummer Jason Marsalis and bassist Rodney Jordan, will showcase their improvisational chops when they join NWS for an inventive interpretation of George Gershwin’s
“Rhapsody in Blue.” (Photo courtesy of New World Symphony)

Gershwin’s wildly popular “Rhapsody in Blue” will present the orchestra with other challenges and opportunities when pianist Marcus Roberts, drummer Jason Marsalis (the younger brother of Wynton Marsalis) and bassist Rodney Jordan take the stage. Roberts, who hails from Jacksonville, got his start working with Wynton Marsalis and has figured prominently in the jazz world for over three decades. He promises that this will be a “Rhapsody” as audiences have never heard it before. It’s a piece he featured on his first major recording, and one he says he never plays the same way twice. Only a boy when he first heard the piece, he still remembers his reaction.

“I was maybe 12 or 13 and didn’t know what it was, but I really liked it,” he says. “The theme spoke to me. It just sounded American to me.”

Grams agrees.

“I find it to be a masterpiece, but I also feel that it is a piece that is sort of embedded in the wide idea of America,” he says.

Roberts’ 1994 recording of “Rhapsody” with Columbia Records was a singular take on a work that had been sanctified in the minds of listeners. The improvisational energy and the individual stamp that he offered was, for some, a shock to the system.

“I caught hell for daring to do the things I chose to do. I’d do interviews and everybody’s like, ‘How dare you? How can you?’”

Grams, for one, is excited to be able to do this iconic work of the American canon with Roberts, “just to see what he and his crew are going to come up with when we rehearse it. And who knows what’s going to happen in the concert?” After all, Gershwin himself was improvising the piano cadenzas at the work’s 1924 Aeolian Hall debut.

Andrew Grams, who began his career as a violinist in the pit at the New York City Ballet, relishes the opportunity
to work with young people like the NWS fellows. “I try to give them a lot of things that I wish I had gotten before,”
he says. (Photo courtesy of New World Symphony)

With Rhapsody, Roberts says, “I make sure that the thematic material of the piece is protected, but I do take it through its paces with true jazz improvisation, which means I let the themes come to me subconsciously.”

A lot of what happens in the hall, says Roberts, is dependent on the alchemy between musicians and audience.

“I want people to know that when they hear ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ it is going to be a 2026 version of it. It will be created, like, spur of the moment, like I said, for them, with them,” says Roberts, “and it’s going to be based on our spiritual interaction in the hall.”

Works like Gershwin’s, performed by artists as different as the New World players and the Marcus Roberts Trio, speak to an optimistic vision of a nation that Roberts embraces.

“We’re able to present this music collaboratively, we’re able to have a great American composer’s music being played by an orchestra by a very, you know, a bunch of different types of folks who have different backgrounds and we walk onstage and then here’s this wonderful audience who’s out there,” says Roberts.

Marcus Roberts, who lost his sight at the age of five, began learning piano from his mother. She told him, “The most important thing about music is that you move people when you play.” (Photo by Rob Macintosh, courtesy of New World Symphony)

“All of these things symbolize the greatness of America,” he says, “what it really can be, what we can do in this country.”

And Roberts, who is blind, will be listening to the reactions of his audience.

“I know in classical music, everybody has to be quiet through all the movements,” he says. “Jazz, it ain’t like that. So, if you feel moved to move your feet or clap your hands, whatever you need to do, we welcome that…Have that dance feeling in the hall. That’s what we want.”

WHAT: New World Symphony, “Rhapsody in Blue,” with Andrew Grams, conductor, and the Marcus Roberts Trio

WHEN: 8 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 10

WHERE: Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

COST: $35 to $225

INFORMATION: 305-673-3331 or www.nws.edu

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