Joshua Rifkin: Scott Joplin: “Bethena –A Concert Waltz”
If you’ve skipped listening to the music selection at the head of this blog, go back now and play it.
It’s Scott Joplin’s “Bethena –A Concert Waltz,” and probably –it’s hard to say because so many Joplin pieces are good– it’s my favorite rag by Scott Joplin (d. 1917), who more than any other composer made ragtime respectable. It’s a gracious piece, softly elegiac, with the slightly off-beat, “ragged” rocking left hand motion that characterized this utterly lovely music.
You can vary dynamics or tempo in rag time but you don’t change the notes. It’s a composed, not improvised on the spot music. Perhaps that’s why I ignored it for so many years –decades, actually. I thought it pleasant enough but I was hooked on improvising and ragtime did;’t have any of that. Then, sometime in the ’90s or ’00s, I started seriously listening to rag time. I’m not sure why but reconstructing my motives, two considerations may have operated.
First of all, though it had taken a long time, I’d finally come to terms with Romantic music, and in particular the piano pieces of composers like Chopin and Tchaikovsky-. I no longer deemed their piano music excessive or soppy, and the fact that it had been pirated so often for movies and pop songs no longer debased it in my judgment. Off all the classical eras, ragtime has the most in common with late Romantic music, especially French Romanticism.
Secondly, here was a body of music, music that I already admitted was respectable. Critics whose judgment I trusted esteemed it. How could I dismiss it as trivial without even giving it a try? I felt obligated to look deeper into it, to take time to listen to rags and try to figure out what in the music appealed. Then I could make my own judgment as to its merit.
I started with Joplin, the piano rags played by Joshua Rifkin and John Arpin. I liked Rifkin’s versions better than Arpin’s but appreciated the work of both players and god, did I love the music they were playing! The more I listened to it, the more I liked it. (If I was to compare Rifkin’s and Arpin’s interpretations, of Joplin’s pieces I’ say that Rifkin played them slower. But when I went back and played both versions of “Bethena,” Rifkin’s, not Arpin’s, is played faster. The sound is richer with Rifkin. Why? Is it that his piano was better miked or does Rifkin made better use of his pedals?
Later, I picked up orchestral versions of rags played by the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra and Gunther Schuller’s New England Conservatory Band.
Joshua Rifkin: Scott Joplin: “Gladiolus Rag”
Joshua Rifkin: Scott Joplin: “Stoptime Rag”
What I found was a lovely music that was both gentle and genteel. It soothed my soul and piqued my interest at pone and the same time. I had finally come to terms with ’20s jazz by then –after a long period when I had ignored and discounted it. I’d finally taken the time to listen to it in all its flavors and become a devotee of a number of performers and groups: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, the Venuti-Lang combos. I’d listened to –bought a number of recordings by– the great stride players of the ’20s and ’30s and on –Jpianist-composers like James P. Johnson, Willie “the Lion” Smith (we saw Willie “the Lion” perform live in the ’60s!), Fats Waller (love that man!), Art Tatum (who played wicked stride), and late practitioners like Dick Hyman, Ralph Sutton, Dick Wellstood, Don Ewell, and Derek Smith. I’d become familiar with offshoots of stride like boogie woogie and dissected that odd amalgam of stride, Romanticism, swing and bop that was pianist Erroll Garner.
Erroll Garner: “I Get a Kick Out of You”
Henceforth, ragtime fit in a spectrum for me, part of a musical story that started with the birth of the twentieth century and progressed at least up to the early 2000s. (Ralph Sutton, the greatest modern stride pianist, didn’t die until 2001, and Dick Hyman is still alive and performing as late as 2104.)
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What was the relationship between stride and rag? Stride came after. The heyday of the great stride performers –Johnson, Smith, Eubie Blake– was in the twenties. Stride was an improvised music; ragtime was composed. The syncopation is heavier and more noticeable in stride and also more varied. Stride pianists sometimes performed for hours on end and they loved to vary their playing. It was a sway to avoid boredom while playing. They experimented. The result was a heavily syncopated music filled with effects, some subtle, some just out there. Stride players tended to play in 4/4 tempo, with bass notes on the first and third beats of the bar and off chords on the second and fourth beats, producing the famed “oompah” sound the music was known for. The best of the stride pianists were brilliant improvisers. If you have any doubts about the power of stride, listen to James P. Johnson’s playing his most popular composition, “Carolina Shout.””
James P. Johnson: “Carolina Shout” (1944)
Out of stride came boogie boogie –Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis and P stew Johnson. Johnson made the transition to rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, which produced performers like the great Creole boogie boogie piano player and vocalist Professor Longhair (whose chief disciple was Dr. John). Listen here to what first Professor Longhair and then pop diva Amy Winehouse (a major talent) do with the blues classic, Stagger L ee.”
(It’s called “Stag o’ Lee” on the Professor Longhair recording.)
Professor Longhair: “Stag o’ Lee” (1978)
Amy Winehouse live: “Stagger Lee” (2011)
This is how music grows. A composer or performer hears another’s work and it lights a spark in his or her head. Every kind of music poses challenges and we –not just musicians but all of us- are puzzle solving creatures. In jazz, puzzles solved yielded new musics. So it went.
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Here, for example, is an oddity of sorts, but a serious one. In 1967, a young composition teacher, William Bolcom, became interested in ragtime. He had a friend, Rudi Blesh, who was the nation’s foremost authority on ragtime music. Bolcom started composing his own and sharing them with his musician friends by mail. Eventually he recorded several.
Here’s one, number 2 from the “Three Ghost Rags,” subtitled “The Poltergeist.” It’s full of leaps and jumps, odd rhythm halts and starts, and Bolcom makes serious harmonic substitutions in the course of its four minutes’ playing. I don’t like it as much as Joplin but it’s interesting and I’ve played it repeatedly, moving the CD back each time so I can start at that cut. Which means there’s something there I’m responding to.
Spencer Myer: William Bolcom: “The Poltergeist”
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Dick Hyman: “Sweet Georgia Brown” (2014: almost seven minutes of Hyman at his best)
Dick Hyman: Ragtime to Stride Lesson (1999)
Dick Hyman: Jelly Roll Morton’s The Finger Breaker
Dick Hyman: Boogie Woogie Lesson (1999)
Dick Hyman: Erroll Garner Lesson (1)
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