Fun with funk: Troy Roberts hits the Hot Jazz trail

Funk fans should enjoy the next installment of the current Hot Jazz series. New York-based Australian-born jazz saxophonist Troy Roberts admits to a predilection for the eminently danceable rhythmic style of music.

Audiences will no doubt get that when he heads a quintet here for gigs in Tel Aviv, Beersheva, Ganei Tikva, Haifa, and Kfar Saba from April 6 to 13. 

“That’s a big part of my musical blood,” Roberts declares. For the 40-something musician, it is about going with the personal flow. “I firmly believe that any music you immerse yourself in will find its way into your playing.” 

That comes across loud and clear from even a five-minute cursory listen to Roberts’s oeuvre to date, with a new record due out any time now. 

“My 16th album is to be released May 10,” he informs me. The man evidently has much to say – and play – and is not holding back. The latest offering follows on the heels of NU-JIVE: LIVE at the Perth International Jazz Festival disc. “That came out last year,” he notes.

Next up is Green Light. It’s getting hard to keep up with Roberts’s output. “What can I say? I love to compose as much as I love to play,” he confesses.

The reedman has some pretty heavy-duty sidemen on board for the new venture. He has John Patitucci on bass, Paul Bollenback on guitar, and 32-year-old Jimmy Macbride on drums.0

Bollenback, like the leader, has mixed it with stellar keyboardist Joey DeFrancesco. At the same time, fellow sexagenarian Patitucci has synergies with several members of jazz royalty in his bio, including now 99-year-old drummer Roy Haynes, iconic keyboardists Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, and legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

Shorter, who passed away last year at the age of 89, is one of the greats that inform Roberts and his Israeli band’s repertoire for their Hot Jazz outing here. 

It is a departure from the Australian’s normal creative and performance pathway. “The quintet in Israel is going to be a very special one because it’s actually not going to involve any of our original music,” he explains. 

“We will be paying tribute to the saxophone greats through the years. It will mostly be focused on Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, and Wayne Shorter.” That is quite a roll call of giants of the discipline, who would all feature in any jazz fan’s list of movers and shakers of the art form over the past 80 or 90 years. 

This is a local reprise for the leader. “I was in Tel Aviv in 2019 with Joey DeFrancesco,” he says. He enjoyed the brief jaunt but hopes to make more of the country this time. “We were in the middle of a tour, and I didn’t really get to look around much.”

Roberts to understand what Israel has to offer

It’s a pity, but hopefully, Roberts will better understand what Israel has to offer over the next week or two. The DeFrancesco date was at that year’s Tel Aviv Jazz Festival, but the current tour has Roberts et al. moving up and down the country for their seven shows.

Roberts has paid his dues and certainly earned the right to go for any style of music he damn well wants, even though, initially, he had no designs on making a career out of jazz.

 “I was just a kid having a blast, playing music,” he says. Still, he had all the requisite gifts to set himself up for eventually making a crust from music. “I was fortunate to have good ears, and I was a quick learner,” he states. 

He hit the gigging trail and never looked back, playing with local bands and even jetting off for long European tours while still a teenager. 

Most budding jazz musicians gravitate to the United States at some point, and Roberts followed suit—at the relatively venerable age of 24—by enrolling for music studies at the University of Miami before making the inevitable move to New York.

Close to two decades, 16 albums, and two Grammy nominations later, Roberts is now coming here to strut his stuff as a leader alongside Los Angeles-based Israeli pianist Tamir Hendelman. They will be joined by Israeli-based trio trumpeter Gregory Rivkin, bassist Asaf Hakimi, and ever-smiling drummer Shai Zelman. It should be a blast.

For tickets and more information, (03) 573-3001 and hotjazz.co.il