Today we’d like to introduce you to Royce Martin.
Hi Royce, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I started the piano when I was 14 and had interest in playing all kinds of different styles, like r&b, gospel and hip hop. as well as jazz, classical music and ragtime. I just wanted to play beautiful music that made me feel something. Stories inside of the music has always been the fascinating part for me. I became really curious about how music built worlds inside my imagination. I really wanted to understand how that worked so I started composing my own music that naturally fused together the stuff that I was learning. This led me to creating my own piece that I played at a city wide talent competition at The Fabulous Fox Theater. This piece was a dramatic, story-esque work that had a romantic era intensity which helped me to externalize my inner dilemmas of teenage angst. This performance won me the talent show, as well as audience choice award, and two other cash and scholarship awards for originality. It was that moment as a sixteen year old that I discovered that I could really make a life out of this. I love music so much for its ability to capture what words can’t, and I felt like I could help bring that to people more and more. This led me to Berklee college of music where I studied film scoring. Writing music for stories helped me keep track of the imaginary worlds that I build when making my own music. I was fortunate to score short docs series on HULU and even a full feature length documentary film on HBO MAX. This all has culminated into a new style that I’ve created called swagtime. Swagtime merges the ragtime left hand groove from my hometown St. Louis tradition, with explorative jazz language like bebop (and beyond), while overlaying rap lyrics on top. This feels like a super engine for musical storytelling.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As an innovator, it can be hard not feeling like you fully belong to any space. The risk in trying to do everything good is doing nothing good, or doing everything in mediocre way. It’s a challenge trying to become a master level rap lyricist and piano player and master at doing both at the same time live. That’s just psychological though because I know that I have nothing to prove, really. I just have to explore out loud all while humbly learning. I have to pass the music on selflessly. Another challenge can be mapping these plans onto reality. Life is expensive. I feel endless conviction in my pursuit yet still. Money comes and goes… People also use to call me corny. But people think everything is corny and honestly, so do I sometimes.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m a pianist and composer who injects the depth of historic, high art music traditions into the accessibility of the modern popular music tradition through a new medium that I’ve coined Swagtime. Specifically, this style integrates the striding left hand groove of ragtime with complex melodic bebop in the right hand, syncs this with the cyclical grooves of beats both electronic and acoustic, and overlays rap lyricism to tell stories. Swagtime is a truly incomparable bridge between the expansive tradition of jazz/classical music and the ear candy vibes of modern popular music. You may have seen me discuss this on the Kelly Clarkson show with Kelly and Big Sean….
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
Over the next 5 to 10 years I predict the hunger for concerts will increase as people get more and more exhausted by tech slop. Human mastery and spectacle will resurge and swagtime with gracefully ride that wave. The industry is growing tired of the generic loop based pop music and overly formulaic, lazy producers and performers. Authenticity, depth, substance…. societal shifts to prioritizing these things will help swagtime thrive in the evolving industry.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.roycemartinmusic.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roycelatrel/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Roycemartinmusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@roycemartinmusic
