By: Valerie Milano
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 2/29/24 – Today’s music content creators face a plethora of decisions about how to market themselves, or if they even should. With YouTube and TikTok beckoning, it seems a simple matter to get people to listen to your music.
Jameel “Jproof” Roberts knows a thing or two about such things. He paused to talk about that at the annual National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Convention, which was held at the Anaheim Convention Center recently. Roberts, who is a member of faculty at the Los Angeles College of Music, was a panelist with several other music industry folks as they discussed writing for film, television, advertising and new media.
The son of Jamaican and Antiguan emigrants, Roberts is a multi-talented platinum-selling producer, songwriter, composer/arranger, educator, and instrumentalist. He is also a multi-Grammy Awards nominee, picking up his first nod in 2015 as both writer and co-producer of R&B artist Usher’s “Good Kisser,” which was nominated for Best R&B song.
Celebrated as “a love song that toes the line between ’60s pop innocence and a slightly naughtier, early ’90s R&B fare a la Bell Biv DeVoe,” it reached the coveted No. 1 spot on the US R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay charts.
A saxophonist by trade, Roberts earned his undergraduate degree in music, specializing in jazz performance, at William Patterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. He also holds a master’s degree from New York University, in film scoring.
Drawing on his own deep heritage of Calypso, Soca, and Reggae, along with a love for harmony and the craft of composing, Roberts has created and performed music for an ever-expanding range of settings. Having been thoroughly immersed in jazz tradition, Baptist Gospel liturgy, Hip-Hop, R&B, and other influences, Roberts has developed a signature sound that has been celebrated both nationally and abroad.
“I have a wide range … I teach an opera class!” he said with a laugh during an interview with The Hollywood Times. “Not to sing it … but there is so much to be learned there. Go listen to Puccini’s operas and tell me there is no intense emotion in those arias. And he’s like doubling the melody in the vocals and the middle strings, and the high strings an octave above …”
Roberts’ voice swells with excitement as he talks about teaching. He displays the same emotions when talking about performing, or about writing.
“I like all kinds of music. As a creative (person), all we do is take all of our inputs, synthesize it, and put it back out there. You can take anything that you learn from any genre and make it fit your own music” he said.
Roberts is a proponent of striking out and making your mark in the music world, a decision he said he made early in his education.
“I was a jazz musician and I thought I was going to be the next John Coltrane, a starving jazz musician who didn’t care. I was going to play the five-dollar gigs because I loved the music,” he said. “But we live in a world where …. well, we have to survive.”
Roberts, who has relied on his teaching, his playing, and his writing to sustain him throughout the years, counsels that “you need to lean into whatever your passion is.”
“I love music, in general. I love Jazz, and yes, I am not gigging and playing jazz, but in all my music, you hear jazz. You hear my upbringing,” he said. “So, you don’t have to let go of your passion for a genre. You find different ways to use it. And depending on what you want to do in music, you have to find a balance between what is going to sustain you and what is going to bring you your joy.”
A versatile collaborator, his distinct musical voice is evident in numerous performance settings. Whether performing and touring on saxophone with the Village Vanguard Jazz Orchestra or rap legend LL Cool J, Roberts’ relational understanding of musical genres allows his voice the license to steadily produce innovative music.
Roberts, a voting member of The Recording Academy, is also the recipient of ASCAP’s Rhythm & Soul Music Award. A member of the International Society of Jazz Arrangers & Composers, his music is published through Sony Music Publishing.
