1 WILLIAM KRELL: Mississippi Rag Two-Step 03:34
2 SCOTT JOPLIN: Gladiolus Rag 05:30
3 SCOTT JOPLIN: Euphonic Sounds: A Syncopated Two-Step 03:14
4 JOSEPH LAMB: Ragtime Nightingale 04:51
5 JAMES SCOTT: Peace and Plenty Rag 03:13
6 EUBIE BLAKE: The Charleston Rag 03:19
7 H. CLARENCE WOODS: Slippery Elm Rag 04:33
8 ZEZ CONFREY: Dizzy Fingers 02:10
9 WILLIAM ALBRIGHT: Sweet Sixteenths 04:26
10 WILLIAM BOLCOM/WILLIAM ALBRIGHT: Brass Knuckles
03:18
William Albright, piano
SCOTT JOPLIN: COLLABORATIVE RAGS
11 Swipesy Cake Walk (1900 - Scott Joplin, Arthur Marshall) 3:17
12 Lily Queen (1907 Scott Joplin, Arthur Marshall) 4:31
13 Sunflower Slow Drag (1901 Scott Joplin, Scott Hayden) 3:46
14 Something Doing (1903 Scott Joplin, Scott Hayden) 3:57
15 Felicity Rag (1911 Scott Joplin, Scott Hayden) 3:34
William Bolcom, piano
The program presented here is a well-balanced selection. It contains selections by a variety of important rag composers, including Eubie Blake, James Scott, Joseph Lamb, and, of course, Scott
Joplin; more important, there is a sampling of some of rağtime literature’s most musically in teresting and unusual compositions.
Billed as the first published rag, Mississippi Rag is really no different from many of the tunes of its time, including, the ones called “cakewalks.” William
H. Krell, a white bandleader from Chicağo, composed it from Neğro folk melodies he heard while touring the Mississippi Valley region. It just
oes to show that the rağ rhythm was already in the
air in 1897 and accessible to the white musicians
who had an ear for it William Albright (b 1944)
gives a strong, straightforward performance of this
early piece, emphasizing its banjo qualities much in
the style of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s The Banjo.
Albright takes the romantic tune Gladiolus Rag and Žives it a pensive air with some eccentric variations.
Scott Joplin (1868-1917), who made classical
rağtime truly classical, wrote Gladiolus during a relatively happy interlude while he was living in New
York with his second wife, Lottie, running a boarding house, giving piano lessons, and writing,
among other pieces, his folk opera Treemonisha.
Gladiolus is clearly Joplin at his creative best.
Written during the same period as Gladiolus,
Euphonic Sounds is one of Joplin’s more
experimental rags and one of his finest Albright is
fully in control of his interpretation and keeps the
pot boiling with a strong tempo and some highly
personal pizzicatos where he seems to grab away
the note almost as he strikes it.
Without doubt the best white rağtime composer,
Joseph F Lamb (1887-1960) was a non-performer
from Brooklyn who, on the surface, seemed to be
singularly ill-equipped to take his place among the
ragtime greats. But pieces like Ragtime Nightingale
speak for themselves. Although Lamb claimed he was inspired by Ethelbert Nevin’s Nightingale Song,
the ascending left hand at the beginning, is also
reminiscent of Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude Lamb
wrote sometimes dense, often romantic, and always
individual music in the style of his hero, Scott
Joplin. Albright plays a strongly rubato version with
more of the introspectiveness we heard in Gladiolus and the gentle, aesthetic approach of a salon piece by Nevin himself.
A Missouri native like Joplin, James Scott (18861938) ”big three” names in ragtime, with Joplin and Lamb. His work was technically difficult but not necessarily musically intricate. In Peace and Plenty, Scott presents none of the romance or moodiness of the other two greats, preferring to show instead a dazzling and metallic brightness glinting with sharp
edges. Albright gives a powerful performance, meeting, the challenge to keep the rhythm going despite its stop-and-go quality He turns it into a show piece with his own embellishments.
Charleston Rag is a very exciting and difficult rag with an innovative, pre-boogie-woogie walking bass, written by a virtuoso for virtuosi. It is awesome to
realize that Eubie Blake (1883-1983) wrote
Charleston when he was a kid of l6 who sneaked over the back fence from his mother’s respectable house to play piano at another sort of house in the
Red Light district of Baltimore. Albright takes on
this blockbuster with skill and aplomb.
Slippery Elm is a quiet, unassuming rag that Albright
plays with a clean simplicity that matches the
innocence of the tune. H. Clarence Woods (18881956) was a little-known white composer who also &ave us another bluesy beauty called Sleepy Hollow.
Following his huge success with Kitten on the Keys, Zez Contrey (l895-1971) wrote another popular novelty rag, Dizzy Fingers. Its appearance here deserves comment. Novelty rags, like Confrey’s, were high-tension Tin Pan Alley variations on a rag rhythm. They were accused of perverting, commercializing, whitening, and even destroying classical ragtime by rag historians like Rudi Blesh. A
few serious musicians are only now beginning to
revive them as delightful in their own right. Suffice it
to say that Dizzy Fingers is lively, difficult, and complete irresistible and that Bill Albright attacks it
with clarity and virtuosity.
At the time Sweet Sixteenths was written, Albripht
believed that it would be the last rag he would ever
write. It does have that wistful melancholy of a
farewell. It has grown partly from a 1974 piece
called The Seven Deadly Sins, in which the ragtime
sin was “Envy” . Albright adapted it for piano and has
since seen it adapted for organ and even arranged for a Warsaw ensemble (piano, trombone, clarinet, and cello) which brought it to Eastern Europe where
it has enjoyed widespread popularity. Envy indeed!
Ás hard-hitting as a pair of brass knuckles, Brass
Knuckles, by Albright and the noted ragtime
revivalist William Bolcom (b. 1938), is aptly named.
It features a smashing left to the keys – sometimes on chords and sometimes on key clusters at random – intriguing chord changes, and a swing interlude. It
all comes to an abrupt halt with a very good finale. It will knock you flat. It is absolutely one of the finest rags to emerge from the recent ragtime revival.
From notes by Terry Waldo and Emily Foster
A
t one point during his life, while he was hunting for
permanent lodginġs, Scott Joplin stayed with Arthur
Marshall (1881-1968): it was some time during,
those months that Swipesy Cake Walk was written.
Internal evidence suggests that the first, second, and fourth strains are Marshall’s, the third by Joplin:
suddenly the Marshall pentatonic flavor in the tunes
gives way to an elegant chromaticism in the Joplin
trio. The great unity of style in Lily Queen suggests
that, despite its collaborative byline, all four strains
are by Marshal, with Joplin providing the four-bar
introduction.
Unlike Marshall, Scott Hayden (1882-1915) published no compositions under his own name, but
his connection with Joplin would produce at least
one of classic ragtime’s best-known dances,
Sunflower Slow Drag. Again it seems clear that
Joplin’s contribution to the rag, is the introduction, with its characteristic Joplin octaves, and the trio.
Hayden’s Something Doing was sold to another St.
Louis publisher, Val A. Reis; here although it is hard to tell (the two men’s musical styles are so close), it appears that Joplin provided not only the introduction and trio but the second strain as well.
Hayden’s other collaborative efforts, Kismet (published in 1913) and Felicity, clearly were written long before their copyright dates; in Felicity, the perfunctory quality of Joplin’s contributed trio and introduction is happily counterbalanced by the strong, folk feeling, in the Hayden strains.
From notes by William Bolcom and William Albright
