“In 2014, Marcus Roberts was honored to have his life and work featured on a segment of the celebrated CBS News television show 60 Minutes. The show, entitled “The Virtuoso”, traced Roberts’ life to date from his early roots in Jacksonville and at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind to his remarkable career as a modern jazz musician. Roberts is perhaps best known for the development of an entirely new approach to jazz trio performance.

Roberts toured with Wynton Marsalis starting at age 21 for six years, when he left to tour and record with his own band. Roberts’ critically-acclaimed legacy of recorded music reflects his tremendous versatility as an artist; his recordings include solo piano, duets, and trio arrangements of jazz standards as well as original suites of music, large ensemble works, and symphony orchestra recordings. ”

“Jason Moran is a specialist in the field of jazz abstraction. The pianist and leader of the trio Bandwagon has a rich knowledge of the music’s history and context — part of the reason, no doubt, that he serves as the Kennedy Center’s artistic adviser for jazz. But Moran rarely reads it straight: He prefers to dissect, fragment, distill and subvert it. ”

“The tenor saxophonist Mark Turner is possibly jazz’s premier player.”

“Bernstein is a master of straight-ahead swing with submerged complexities, which is a way of saying that, while his music is advanced, the listener never feels shut out.”

“The style is modern mainstream jazz, a combination of post-bop, modal and Latin elements, of which Kenny Barron is among today’s reigning masters. In fact, he helped invent it, 40-odd years ago, by simply absorbing the sounds in the air at the time. Now, a pianist, composer and bandleader of apparently infinite resource and ingenuity, he records albums as close to perfection as anyone could wish. Lately they have tended to be piano trios, but this sleek new quintet sounds full of promise.”

“Among the dozen or so most admired pianists in jazz today, Kenny Barron strikes me as the one who wears his mastery most comfortably. From a languid piece such as Dreams, to Thelonious Monk’s fiendishly tricky Shuffle-Boil, there’s a gentle firmness to his playing. In some mysterious way he makes the piano sound bigger too. Bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and drummer Johnathan Blake follow every move with seamless subtlety.”

“There are moments, in the tumble of a typical improvisation, when the saxophonist Chris Potter seems to be embarked on a hero’s journey. With his strong, focused tone and top-to-bottom proficiency on the horn, he brings a robust physical presence to his playing and an onward-driving sense of purpose. His deployment of notes, parceled into staccato bursts or gracefully arcing phrases, suggests a split-second calculation of risk and reward. He works with an intuitive logic, venturing far from a theme and only gradually returning there, all the while responding to the changing conditions set by his band.”

“There are moments, in the tumble of a typical improvisation, when the saxophonist Chris Potter seems to be embarked on a hero’s journey. With his strong, focused tone and top-to-bottom proficiency on the horn, he brings a robust physical presence to his playing and an onward-driving sense of purpose. His deployment of notes, parceled into staccato bursts or gracefully arcing phrases, suggests a split-second calculation of risk and reward. He works with an intuitive logic, venturing far from a theme and only gradually returning there, all the while responding to the changing conditions set by his band.”