Gilbert ‘Gil’ Roberts Photograph
c. 1920, Europe
About Gil Roberts
As an internationally acclaimed jazz musician, Roberts was received in the court of King Farouk in Egypt. He worked as a janitor at Amherst College. Born April 25,1896 on Hazel Avenue to Perry and Ella Roberts in a home his father built, “Gil” lived to be 106. Gil had to leave his home frequently to provide for his family because professional opportunities were not available to him in Amherst. After 7 years away, he returned home due to sickness. He forged lasting friendships with several Amherst-based alumni, including Stan McDonald, who was key in Gil’s recognition at the Newport Jazz Festival, and Ulric Haynes Jr. ’52, who profiled him in Amherst magazine in 2012. In the piece, Haynes notes,
"He had a remarkable ability to attend to his custodial duties with amazing speed and efficiency, leaving plenty of time in the late afternoon to lose himself playing the jazz banjo on the club’s back porch or in the furnace room. That’s where I would find him whenever I needed advice.
Many is the hour that I would sit transfixed, listening to Gil’s fingers coaxing one jazz melody after another from his banjo. Gil’s modesty never allowed him to indulge in bragging about traveling to some 20 countries around the world with Louis Armstrong’s band in the 1930s. Nor did he ever tell me that he had accompanied the legendary Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère in Paris. Nor was there a hint of a boast that he had performed for Egyptian King Fu’ad I, who’d given Gil two ebony and ivory walking sticks. Indeed, Gil traveled so far and wide in the early 1930s that his daughter, Edythe, did not get to know her father until she was 7. Indeed, Gil was no ordinary Amherst custodian."
You can hear Gil playing banjo on this recording from 1925 of the Blue Ribbon Syncopators.
