Tom Roberts is a leading exponent of early jazz piano. He's played everywhere from New York’s Carnegie Hall and the Tonight Show to the major jazz clubs in the French Quarter.
Our new 12-song album Breaking Up The House is now available!
Albums be ordered directly from the manufacturer.
You can stream the album on Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, YouTube, and all other major streaming platforms. Downloads can be purchased from the iTunes store or Amazon.com.
Now thanks to my friend Rick Sebak, I get to play for my hero, my music, played on the very piano Johnny Costa used for the neighborhood.
Read MoreWhat we refer to as “sound” is simply our perception of vibrations.
To state this idea in the simplest possible manner:
When you hear me speak, my breath is causing my vocal cords to vibrate, which is amplified by my mouth, putting the molecules of air into motion, causing them to vibrate, and those vibrations enter into the listener’s ear, causing their eardrum to vibrate, and these vibrations are transferred to the three tiny bones within the ear to translate those vibrations into what our brain interprets as sound.
When recording were originally created, the performer would stand in front of a large horn that acted as the ear. He or she would sing or play and the vibration of their breath would travel into the “ear” causing a device reproducing the ear drum to vibrate that caused a needle to etch those vibrations into a spinning disc, capturing the breath into grooves.
When we put the steel needle into the grooves of a 78 RPM record this process is reversed.
We feel the vibrations of the breath of a person who has left this earth come back at us across the centuries.
This is the closest thing we have to time travel and not only that!
Breath is what gives life. It is called different things in different traditions. It is sometimes called prana, which is synonymous with the life force.
When we put the needle into the groove we in essence bring the dead back to life.
Want to experience this yourself?
Join me and join The Hot Club Of Pittsburgh third Thursdays at Scratch Food & Beverage and hear the most miraculous things you've never heard before!
I will be spinning shellac hot jazz from the original 78 rpm records on a vintage portable wind up victrola.
From The Saturday Light Brigade: Music and conversation in memory of Leon Redbone with his former pianist and musical director Tom Roberts.
At the bottom of my staircase is my newly framed Geology of Leon Redbone containing most of his musical ancestors and as I passed it, I began to cry.
I began to cry because I am who I am today because of him.
Every significant event in my life was influenced by him.
Read MoreThinking of Leon Redbone, who passed away this week.
Leon Redbone on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1990. Tom Roberts on piano.
Saturday, July 21, 2001
By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic
Tom Roberts' journey to playing piano on the latest Leon Redbone album, "Anytime," began on the stage of Graffiti.
Roberts wasn't on stage.
Redbone was.
Roberts, at the time a Schenley High School music teacher, was in the audience. As he recalls, "I said, 'I've always wanted to play with this guy. I need to get out of this town.' So I gave him a tape on stage."
Tom Roberts accompanies the silent films "The Rink," "The Pawn Shop" and "Kid Auto Races at Venice California" in his own score with Mary Beth Malek on clarinet.
In this conversation with Jim Cunningham, they describe the genius of Charlie Chaplin, provide details on the event, and talk about the music they will play along with four excerpts from the score or the films recorded in the WQED-FM studio.
Sure, Leon Redbone changed my life.
In 1990 I went on tour with Redbone, which was a dream come true. My first performance on the road was The Tonight Show! I had never left Pittsburgh and was starting feel as if life would be a tragedy and that I needed to escape. I realized that life was more than just working at something that you didn’t like, let alone love and tried to escape the previous year with a failed attempt to move to New Orleans and play music exclusively.
This all changed after June 1990.
Read More
Pittsburgh’s rockin' rhythm & jazz trio, The Red Beans & Rice Combo, will serve up a delightful musical gumbo with their debut recording, Let the Joy Begin!
Read MoreRick Sebak re-purposed some of the music I composed for the first two installments of Nebby and the results are delightful for "People Who've Written Books Around Here".