Royce Martin • Memories On Morgan Street: Scott Joplin Reimagined

When Royce Martin’s profile ran on our cover in December we received a thank you from an accomplished musician in her 40s, the unspoken implication being thank you for featuring a young Black man. The traditional jazz community has lamented for decades the lack of diversity on stage. As an illustration, 1984’s Cotton Club movie attempted to recreate the sound of Duke Ellington’s late ’30s Orchestra. Primarily white musicians were used because in 1984, and still today, the musicians most deeply familiar with and studied up on the individual instrumentalists of Duke’s band in that era happen to be white. Francis Ford Coppola threw out the first version of the soundtrack, and the band that made it, because it had sounded too modern, too influenced by music schools. Many on the final soundtrack had studied under musicians of the era in question, including Sidney Bechet, or even played with members of Duke’s band. I drop my idea for a Clarence Williams bio-pic out there whenever I can. A musician and a businessman, I think he would resonate. King Oliver sounds like a movie title ready made—and what a story! There are many careers from the era that might inspire a young Black man to turn his musical studies toward the vast ocean of early jazz. I don’t think those stories are being told the right way, or in the right places, and in many cases their art is given academic fra