Rick Roe got behind the wheel of his 2005 white Chevy Equinox and headed to Ann Arbor to play at the Earle. He pulled over on Ashley St. between Huron and W. Washington and there it was, larger than life: a mural of his hero, Thelonious Monk.
Roe found the depiction of the influential bebop artist “beautiful, not loud yet so colorful. It draws you in. And, of course, seeing him…”
Painted by the Lansing-based artist Brian Whitfield on the side of the building that once housed the Del Rio bar, the image of Monk triggered memories. Roe thought of Forsythe Middle School, where jazz trumpeter Louis Smith taught, the friend at Community High who encouraged him to listen to Monk’s albums, and when he first played at the Del in the 1970s.
The middle son of jazz singer and Community High teacher Betsy King and Charles Roe, who sang with the New York City Opera, the Michigan Opera Theatre, and other companies, Roe grew up in a home filled with music. “My mom had a lot of great records,” he recalls. Her Broadway cast recordings included standards that he would later hear with jazz covers and then play himself.
Roe heard his father sing Falstaff at the Power Center and his mother sing in local clubs. He also heard world-class jazz talents, some brought here by Eclipse Jazz, a U-M student group that operated from 1975–1993.
Eclipse mounted a festival at Hill Auditorium in 1978 that featured Mose Alison, Art Blakey, Kenny Burrell, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Freddie Hubbard, Max Roach, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. Over the years, Eclipse also booked Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Earl Klugh, Pat Metheny, Charles Mingus, and Oscar Peterson.
“We also had the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival from the early seventies,” Roe says, almost awed by the memory. It brought another who’s who list of talent to the city. “I’m hearing all this music that’s bewildering to me in the greatest of ways,” he recalls
At Forsythe, he got to study with Louis Smith—and one day, when he went to hear his teacher play at the Del Rio, Smith said “Come on and sit in.” By the mid-1980s, Roe was playing there with different bands, including his own.
Roe’s parents separated before he started high school. In 1981, he left Ann Arbor for four years, finishing high school in L.A. and studying jazz at the University of Southern California, where his father taught.
He had already discovered Thelonious Monk. “I was really young when I first heard Monk’s music,” Roe recalls. He wondered, “How could he write such great music and play like that?” Then a friend from Community shared some records and said, “Check out these albums.”
The more he listened, “the more I was knocked out by what he was doing,” Roe recalls. He fell in love with Monk’s “unorthodox way of playing the piano, his time, his rhythm.”
Soon Roe was playing Monk’s music. He would go on to first place in the 1994 Great American Jazz Piano Competition, and twice be a semifinalist in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition, in 1993 and 1999.
He balanced performances with teaching gigs at schools that include the University of Arizona, North Texas University, Michigan State University, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the U-M, regaling students with stories of Monk and his music. Some say his 1994 album Monk’s Modern Music is a jazz classic.
These days, whether he plays at Blue LLama, the Kerrytown Concert House, or does a solo gig at the Earle, Roe usually includes a few of Monk’s tunes and some of his own. These show Monk’s influence, but Roe has studied many other great musicians—“Herbie Hancock, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, and not only piano players”—as well. His music integrates their influence and is entirely his own.
When Roe was at USC, he says, “fusion was becoming big in L.A., and there were fewer spots to hear bebop.” But the bebop scene was alive and well in Southeast Michigan. He moved back and played around the area, sometimes accompanying his mother, sometimes doing solo gigs at the Gandy Dancer, sometimes appearing at the clubs that comprised Detroit’s vibrant jazz scene. “In the late eighties, I got to play in Marcus Belgrave’s band with Rodney Whitaker,” he recalls.
In 1985, bassist Ron Brooks opened the Bird of Paradise on Ashley. Once, when Dizzy Gillespie came through, Roe found himself there with Gillespie and another trumpeter. “We were in a room with Dizzy,” he says, sounding incredulous. “So many great musicians came through there,” and he played with many of them as the Bird’s house pianist.
One night when the house was dark, Roe noticed “somebody sitting next to the wall as the lights came up. “It was Ahmad Jamal, the jazz pianist, and my heart just about dropped into my stomach. He checked us out. And he liked it!”
John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton also heard him play and showered the band with compliments. The Modern Jazz Quartet enjoyed Roe at the Gandy Dancer. When Harold McKinney, “the great Detroit jazz player, said, ‘Come here, let me tell you something, you can play the blues,’ I almost started crying,” says Roe.
“When Wynton Marsalis was in town, they would come by after their gig and jam at the Bird. He said on three occasions, ‘Rick Roe, you are a bad motherfucker, I got your CD in my car.’”
Roe moved to Saline in 2001, when his wife Deborah found an affordable house that they loved. They lived there with their son, Jarret. By then, Roe’s stepdaughter, Tera Sky, was grown and on her own; today she is a teacher in the Lincoln Schools. Roe commuted to East Lansing for ten years to teach at MSU. In 2012, he lost Deborah, a dance teacher, to cancer.
The Bird closed in 2004, but the Firefly, which opened in 2000 in the Bird’s old home on Ashley, continued to bring in top acts. The Firefly moved to N. Main in 2007 and closed in 2009, but jazz artists kept coming, this time to the Kerrytown Concert House. The Blue LLama opened in 2019, and these days, Roe is frequently found at the Steinway there.
But he hasn’t forgotten his days playing at the Del Rio in the late eighties and early nineties. Roe says he’s returned to the mural a couple of times since he first saw it, to enjoy it, to remember.
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