Porres.com – Eric's Humble Place in Cyberspace

As an avid musician and listener to many kinds of music–in particular jazz–I’ve followed Marcus Roberts for a long time, back to my early teens in the 80′s.  Along with an 8 piece band, Marcus Roberts absolutely shot the moon this past weekend, revisiting Deep in the Shed, an album he released in 1990, at The Allen Room in the Time Warner Center.  Deep in the Shed is one of the first jazz CDs I ever owned (CDs were still “new” back in 1990), and is a contender for my list of desert island discs.  An overall favorable review from the NYTimes appears here.  I was lucky to hear them play the last set Saturday night, wherein they kept jamming with two encores, and hardly a performance that I would call “restrained” (per the NYTimes review).  The Allen Room is now also most likely my most favorite place to listen to jazz in New York City, surpassing even the Village Vanguard, my previous favorite location.

I can only hope that someday a recording of the revisitation will be released so that more can be exposed to this amazing musician.  In fact, I’d love to spend an hour with Wynton Marsalis and talk about how an organization like Jazz At Lincoln Center (or any for that matter) could extend the benefits of a live concert to those who attended by offering up that concert for digital consumption.  I would put down money and bet that any and everyone who attended this performance for example would tack on an additional $9.99 to get a digital download of the concert afterwards.  Obviously there would be some limitations, like only online ticket buyers would be eligible in order to track the music back to an email address, etc., but the technical limitations to ‘holding back’ the memory of a live performance no longer exist.