Exploring the History of Ragtime Music

Now folks, that was the Maple Leaf Rag written by Scott Joplin. It was published in 1899. There's talk that he actually wrote it in 1897. But that is the quintessential rag. And until recently when Joshua Rifkin actually changed that, that's the one piece that everybody knew by Scott Joplin. And it's actually a march. And the first recordings of it... We're by the Marine Band, a military band, and it's a syncopated march, and that's what we think about as quintessential ragtime music. It has syncopation continuously. That is, putting the accents on the offbeat. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. And that was the essence of ragtime. Nobody quite knows who the first person to do ragtime was. It might have been Monteverdi, actually. We were in... you can hear in some of his music actually, syncopation, continuous syncopation, that you would have called ragtime, if you didn't know any better. The term rag, nobody could quite find out what the origin of that was. Ben Harney claimed that he coined the phrase ragtime, and there's been newspaper accounts of the word rag going back as far as the 19th century. as the 1820s, and apparently it applied to the dance. You would attend a rag. And then so ragtime would have been the music that was applied to that. Anyway, it became very popular in 1897. And there were rags like we just heard, which eventually became the classical rag of Scott Joplin. There were ragtime songs which had that kind of syncopation. So ragtime was everywhere, and it became the popular music of the turn of the century until about 1917 when the word jazz sort of came in. and usurp that idea. So we're going to hear many styles of ragtime, and I've been so fortunate to be able to assemble some of the people who are responsible for the way that we think about ragtime and who really sort of gave the idea of what ragtime was back as far as the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, all of that. And... I purposely just got the old guys here. I didn't bring any youngsters into the thing. We still got what it takes to stomp them, except for my first guest. And the gentleman I would like to introduce first is the man who who really, I would say, got me interested in ragtime. And that was back as early as 1960. And he did so much to present ragtime in the media, to make music available, this stuff, the sheet music was not available anyplace. He popularized it, he did shows, he did theatrical shows, and he played great. Now... He's told me that he's not, he just sold all of his pianos and so he's not playing. He's the only one that's not playing, but he's a marvelous raconteur, among other things. And I think he can give you the story from his point of view when he got started doing a couple of great television shows in 1960 and before that. Will you welcome Max Morath. Thank you, Terry. Forgive me if I'm reading. I learned a long time ago that you should script your ad libs. Terry has asked us to deal, essentially, up here with the so-called revival of Ragtime, which to many people started around 1970 with the New York Public Library publication of Scott Joplin with The Sting and so forth. So we'll be doing that, and I can tell you... that all of us up here, all five of us, during the so-called revival period, played a lot of what they used to call honky-tonk or ricky-tick or rinky-tink piano. Now it's called ragtime. And all of us can testify that we played every bad piano in the United States. I gotta tell you, you'd go to one place and there'd be a nice fine Steinway. Grand. The next time you're playing a Wurlitzer spinet in an arrest home that hasn't been tuned since the Eisenhower administration. And I can tell you that one time, all of us, I think, when we're going to go play a concert, we'd call up and say, what's the piano? Tell me about the piano. And hope. And I, when I was still living in Denver, I did a series of programs for a big grocery chain that had stores all over northern Colorado and Wyoming. And I remember playing a show in Landers, Wyoming. I called up the guy and I said, tell me about the piano. He says, don't worry, Mr. Morath. He said, you're going to love our piano. We just had it painted. So that said, Terry has asked me to do two things. One of them is to briefly tell you how I got interested in this music, and then to discuss briefly the television programs that we did for, at that time, NET, before PBS. I discovered a song when I was just working in the saloons called I'm Certainly Living a Ragtime Life, published in 1900 by a couple of guys in Chicago. It had some words like, I've got a ragtime dog and a ragtime cat, a ragtime piano in my ragtime flat. And I added some words to that, which are relevant. I said, I'm going to rag till morning and then we'll all stay up drinking ragtime whiskey from a ragtime cup. And that was a veiled salute to the first ragtimer in my family. No, not my mother. It was her oldest brother, my uncle, Richard Ramsel. He was my ragtime godfather, and I'll tell you why. He never knew it. His little sister, my mother, Gladys Ramsel, was a school pianist, and she played the rags, played them well. The Ramsels were from Ottumwa, Iowa. Gladys, my mother, the youngest of a family of eight. My uncle Dick, the oldest brother by 15 years. He was a 19th century Renaissance man. Artist, poet. lawyer, the family alcoholic, and a wicked pianist, especially when he'd had a couple of those ragtime cups. Anyway... He never learned to read music. So he'd buy the new sheet music and he'd bring it home. And we're talking the 1900s when all the good stuff was being written. Early 1900s. He'd bring them home for my mother, his little sister, Gladys, to read them and play them. By the time she was 12, she could read like a bandit. So her big brother would listen a couple of times. And then he'd sit down and play them by ear. in his own key, which was probably either F sharp or C. All air players play either in all the white notes or all the black notes. And many of those precious sheets of that great ragtime were still in our piano bench when I was growing up, because my mother took them with her when she moved to Colorado. And she played in the silent movies out there, by the way, at the Princess Theater in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And then she became a professional journalist. And I've always been proud that my mom not only knew how to spell, but had a great left hand. And, okay, that piano bench with all those old rags, he bought the good stuff for her to play. He bought the Maple Leaf rag, of course. And then Scott Joplin's original rags, Easy Winners, that beautiful piece. Sensation. And she had one of those priceless John Stark folios, you know, with great stuff like James Scott's Hilarity Rag and Joe Lam's American Beauty. So if you were learning to play the piano when you were a kid and you were taking kid piano lessons, which I did, you heard your mother play those rags. You had to learn them. Ragtime insists. It's piano music you can't resist. Nobody forced you to, by the way, but nobody stopped me. My mother said, sure, and my dear piano teacher, a liberal-minded woman by the name of Gladys Wardwell, realized that rags were essential to piano, and she said, that's fine, they're good exercises, they're better than Hannon or Cherney. So that's what I did. A treasured memory, to get back to my uncle just for a moment. When I was nine years old, we spent part of a summer in Iowa, and he still lived on the farm outside of town. First experience, by the way, was the Kerosene Land War Privy. And my Uncle Max was also in town, and those guys showed me how to kill a chicken by wringing its neck, and also how to play pinochle. But I heard some ragtime. One night, I heard my Uncle Dick play the rags that he had learned by ear. They still had a good piano, big old Somer upright, in good tune, good ivories. And when he played, in my memory, he sat down and he first played the melodies. He played the right hands, like songs. Then he'd begin to add the left hand and start to syncopate. And he'd swing out in perfect time. And that combination, and I tell you this because a lot of people really don't realize this, but at that time, and I'm nine years old, I realized that ragtime is music. I think that's not often said, and it's music. Okay, now. Fast forward to the 1950s. I'm working in radio and TV, jazz dates, piano bars, saloons, like we all did. And I'm putting in summers as the musical director of the Imperial Players, Cripple Creek, Colorado. We did melodramas, Curse You Villain, Lily the Felon's Daughter, or More Sinned Against Than Sinning. And you had to learn all the old tunes, and of course I began to do rags. But ragtime was waiting in the wings in that theater and television, because our stage manager, a fellow there by the name of Moss Hall, got a job right away in 1959 as a producer of Denver's public television station. He called me up one day and he said, let's together, he said they wanted pilots, they're trying to get some... entertainment values into educational television. And he said, they'll pay you. I said, I'm good. And we did a pilot film. which we called before jazz, but they renamed happily the ragtime era. And Terry has asked me to tell you just a little about how those programs came about. So here goes. In the next two years, we made a total of 28 half-hour programs about the music, but also about the life and times of America during those early years of the 20th century, as seen through the music. We dubbed the whole turn-of-the-century period as the the ragtime era and we were getting a lot of good national publicity but here's the reason and it has nothing to do with the music i like to think that the success of ragtime in my view for those public television shows which were shown here in new york for 10 years had to do with technology not music We did those things right at the time when videotape, which had not come along yet, we were still doing, if some of you remember the terrible old kinescope films that we saw on television when we saw Ed Sullivan, or, you know, they were terrible. But videotape changed everything, and our series was the first series, fall of 1959, to be distributed nationally on... Ampex reel-to-reel videotapes and the quality was astonishingly good. And the people at Ampex who did the machine gave 60 of their new Ampex videotapes to the existing 60 stations, which were not PBS yet, you know. PBS didn't come until 1967. This was National Educational Television based in Ann Arbor. But these were distributed nationally to a lot of these little tiny stations. And the big videotapes were difficult to handle. You'd get rollovers and you'd get bad quality and you'd get dropouts and all that. But our chief engineer in Denver, which was one of the main producers for the network, mastered the Ampex reel-to-reel. Before long, all of these other 60 stations were flying my good friend Scotty Cullen, chief engineer. Help! We need help with these videotapes! So he'd get on an airplane with his carry-on, with the Ampex instruction book, and a copy of the ragtime years. And the other thing that turned a corner for us, this is 1960 now, there was no public station. in New York. WNED did not exist. So those programs were aired on Channel 9, WOR. Suddenly we're getting reviewed in the New York Times, we're getting reviewed, we're getting copy in Newsweek and so forth. And my phone began to ring. And that's the story of those shows. Max has left out a lot of the things that he did to help promote ragtime in those days. He was all over radio. He used to be on the Author Godfrey program, what, about three times a week? You were on the Author Godfrey program? Oh yeah, the radio show. I never did TV with him. Yeah, but you did the radio show. I used to hear him and he was doing all these ragtime songs and playing the rags. That's right. He put together a quartet during the 60s. It was mainly strings and did a lot of these rags and then played in the Village, right, the Village Gate? Vanguard. Vanguard, Village Vanguard. Popularized it in all kinds. He was on the Bell Telephone Hour. He really represented ragtime, and not just with those shows, but continuing. And then, as I mentioned, you were on Broadway with a... show. Never on Broadway. Off Broadway. That other place. Oh yeah. Okay. I take that back then. Off Broadway. This is off Broadway now. That's right. So our next guest up here is a man who I think really changed and added to the way we thought of ragtime. Incidentally, you can get all this story in the book, This is Ragtime. But in the 70s, in New York, ragtime was rediscovered. And a couple of people had a lot to do with it. Bill Volcom was one person who became interested in it. There was the publication of the Scott Joplin rags, almost the complete collection of those that came out. They rediscovered Scott Joplin's opera, and that was produced during the 70s also. But the main thing that really caught fire was an album of Scott Joplin rags that was played by Joshua Rifkin, our guest here. And Joshua, if you would tell the story yourself, that would be great. Thank you so much. Distinct work. Okay, it's on. First of all, I just want to say it's a great pleasure and honor to be here, especially with this wonderful cast of colleagues, people I've... Just to be here with this wonderful cast of musicians, people I've admired for so long. A little bit about how I came to the music. I had, for the most part, a fairly conventional classical music upbringing in New York, but I did have an older brother who was very interested in early jazz, and who played it, in fact. He played the cornet and trumpet, and he needed somebody to accompany him, and he had a younger brother who took piano lessons and had a fair amount of pianistic ability, so he kind of press-ganged me into service doing this. And in the course of this and over the next few years, I came to know quite a bit of early jazz. I had the good fortune to meet and sometimes play with several of the survivors of the New Orleans and Chicago jazz scenes. It was a wonderful, heady education. And of course, I came across Scott Choplin some in this process as well. We tended, at that time, many of us, to look at Joplin as kind of a sort of precursor of jazz, or see him through jazz-tinted lenses, and certainly when I played Joplin in those days, it was very much the way a New Orleans jazz pianist would do it. Then the music fell out of my horizon until, in the late 1960s, I was sort of brought back to it by two... good friends, two composer friends of mine, Eric Salzman and Bill Balkum. And Eric and Bill had both become extremely taken with Joplin in particular, and I lived at the time around the corner from Eric in Brooklyn Heights. And, you know, one day Eric says to me, look, I have this wonderful music, Scott Joplin, and I say sort of, oh, Scott Joplin, I know that. And I look at the music and I think, no, I don't know this. I saw something completely different from what I had thought I'd seen before. I started to play this music and you know this was a wonderful composer, a man who just had endless inspiration, endless ideas, a wonderful range of expression and I just got completely carried away with it as happens to just about anybody who really becomes acquainted with this stuff and I played it at every chance I could get and Bill and I played things together and gave performances together etc. Just by chance, I was working for a record company, Nonsuch Records, doing production work and also making recordings for them, and I had a certain freedom to record whatever I wanted to, as long as it wasn't too expensive. And I came to them one day and said, well, you know, I've been doing 15th century French secular music and 17th century German music, etc., but... This is Joplin, this is wonderful stuff, we should really do it, and I think I can, you know, get you a good deal on The Pianist. So they agreed, and we did it, and I should explain something about how Nonsuch worked in those days. This is a very different era, but we didn't do any marketing, any advertising, any promotion. We just made the records and we put them out on the market to die. We certainly thought no different about this, to be very honest. We were all very taken with the music, but we had no idea what was going to happen with it. I thought maybe, you know, instead of selling 200 copies like, you know, 15th century French secular music might do 400 copies. So we were totally, totally, totally, totally taken aback by the response to it. It seemed to unleash something. And it seemed obviously to... speak to something that was there waiting to be spoken to in a lot of the American musical public. And then what happens is, of course, pretty much known to everybody, so I won't go into that, but that gives you the background of how that particular wrinkle in this particular chapter got wrinkled and made its way. Thank you. I want to hear two tunes in particular that you recorded, and you will know them immediately. Because the other thing that happened, after his record came out, and it was played on all stations. It was on classical stations, it was popular music, it was everywhere. Especially the recording of The Entertainer, which is the one that I don't think it sold that much when it first came out. when it was first published by Joplin in, what was it, 1904? 1902, I believe. 1902 or something like that. But suddenly with his recording, it became enormously popular, and that's what really popularized ragtime. And it was put in a movie called The Sting. You all sit there and say, yes, you remember that. Well, that was his fault. You want to talk about that? I'm just going to say a couple of things about The Entertainer. In fact, that was the first Joplin piece I ever came across. Maybe together with Maple Leaf Rag. There was an old recording of it by a jazz band led by Bunk Johnson, who had been a great trumpeter in New Orleans in the very old days and then was rediscovered as an old man and made... recordings in the late 1940s and one of them was basically the red back book arrangement of The Entertainer played with a very light delicate swing by Johnson and his colleagues and that I knew from very early on. But I have to give some credit here to Bill Baulkham because it was Bill whom I first heard play it and I may not have rediscovered it without Bill. And I was absolutely taken with it when I first heard Bill play it, and to a certain extent, to be very honest, all my life I've been trying to get back and capture what it was that I heard Bill do when he first did it in my hearing. But I was so taken with it that I in fact asked that we begin the first Joplin album with it. I said, I really want this to be the first thing on the album. Everybody said, no, no, no, no, no, nobody's ever going to go for this. We have to start with Maple Leaf Rag. Well, Maple Leaf Rag is a wonderful piece, and chronologically it was, of course, the appropriate piece with which to begin. But in fact, there was skepticism about the entertainer at the time. Little did they know. Little did they know, indeed. And the other piece that also you first made popular was Solace, which was an unusual Joplin. It's called Hold a Mexican Ceramide, right? Yes, it's a very unusual piece. And again, I can claim really little credit there in the sense that I was not taken with solace when I first came across it. I think Martin Williams of the Smithsonian sent it up to me. He said, I should, by the way, mention that this happened before the New York Public Library edition. So we were still sort of like getting bootleg copies, samizdat copies of Joplin and trying to assemble the work. you know, the corpus of the works as much as we could. So Martin Williams sent this to me and said, you know, I think it's a beautiful piece. And I remember that a composer friend of mine was visiting and he was also very fascinated with ragtime. And I played this. And to my eternal shame, you know, full disclosure, I played it and I said, I don't think this is absolutely first class Joplin. What was I thinking? And he immediately said, oh, this is wonderful. And of course, pretty soon I did get persuaded. Mike wants to know if he can ask you a question, and no, you may not. When I heard your recording on Nonsuch, it seemed to me to take a different attitude and treatment to this wonderful music than what we'd been hearing before. And I just was wondering what, you know, I thought it was just great, and I knew as an old record producer that it was an ingenious way to handle it. Because, to be blunt, you would get the people that have a Mondrian print and listen to Vivaldi. And anyway, I was just wondering why you chose to interpret the material the way you did. or how you... I have been asked that question both positively and negatively many times in my life. Well, this is positive. No, that's extremely kind, Mike. I don't know how much of a conscious choice it was. As I say, when I became reacquainted with it through Eric and Bill, I did see it through a very different lens. And I think what I saw... there was the, if you will, the composed music. I mean, I had improvised and all of that stuff before, but I saw just how fastidiously made the music was. And from everything I could find out, ragtime was basically a music that was played. according to the notes, unlike jazz, etc. And the rest, I think, just came out of my own predilections as a musician and how I responded to what I was seeing there. It just seemed to me what the music was saying. Over the years, things have modified. They have to. You never play anything quite the same way. But... That's just the way the music spoke to me. And I hope it speaks to some other people as well. Could you play a couple pieces for us so we can hear what it sounded like? The Joplin that changed the world. Here we go. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And now we're going to shift gears quite a bit and I'm going to introduce an old friend of mine who was digging into an offshoot of ragtime. which we would call stride piano. And the interesting thing about ragtime to me, and I think ragtime was the first jazz. I think you could make an argument that ragtime was... jazz was a kind of ragtime. but ragtime is really the fundamental part of it. But some of the early piano players, I would say U.B. Blake might have been the grandfather of stride piano. You can make a pretty good argument in that case. But a branch of ragtime that was developed on the East Coast... Among the various piano players, it became known as Stride. James P. Johnson was the guy that we call the father of Stride piano. Fats Waller was another one. And then that style is also... in Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk. Stride piano, which often was developed in Harlem, permeates a lot of the piano styles. that come later. Well, the gentleman that I'm going to introduce to you right now, as a kid, started contacting a lot of the early piano players. He spent time with UB Blake, with Willie the Lion Smith, with Cliff Jackson, a number of the piano players, and really learned stride piano. Not only that, he became a record producer for RCA, among others, and produced albums of this stuff. The Vintage Series on RCA. That was Mike Lipskin here. So during the... When did you start? In the 60s? 64. And then of course through the 70s when ragtime became popular we were on an album together with UB Blake at one point where he had three of the UB's protégés doing a live concert. But Mike is really the guy that really has dug into stride piano. And so I would like to introduce him now to talk about how he got into it and maybe what the differences are between ragtime and stride. And you can use the piano as you wish. Mike Lipskin. Thank you. Thank you. I want to thank Terry for including me in this, and I want to thank Seton Hawkins, who, without him, we would have all fallen apart. He worked very hard to coordinate and get all this together. Anyway, when I was four, about four or five, I'd be left alone. My father had been, first, a newspaper reporter, a police blotter in Harlem, and he loved... black music, so he'd go to these clubs and he would hear Willie the Lion and James P. Johnson. He didn't know what they were doing. In fact, I don't even think it was called Stride Piano then. But he heard it, and so we had Fletcher Henderson and Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, 78s at home. And if you were careful and you didn't break them, they were easy to play. They were a lot easier than an LP for a five-year-old to not ruin. by putting it on this tabletop Ansley phonograph we had. So I heard the Fats Waller piano solo in Christopher Columbus and it was a visceral feeling that I had. It was almost a musical orgasm, I guess you could call it, for want of a better term. I forgot, this is a family program. Anyway, so... I got the bug that early, and I eventually wanted to learn. So by the time I was 12, my father was kind enough to take me to places where Willie the Lion would play. I'd read in the New Yorker that he was one of the last of the Stride pianists, and I met him, and we became friends. Then I had enough nerve because of this thirst to call up in the phone book. They were in the phone book. Cliff Jackson, Lucky Roberts, UB, Willie Gant. It is true. These people, they were just sitting at home. Bop was in, and nobody called them, so they were very happy to have a young, you know, a 16-year-old or a 14-year-old come up and hang out with them. And not only did I learn osmotically stride, because I don't read well, I spent a lot of time with Willie, but Willie would go over to the piano, he'd have a cigar and his derby and his pajamas and his bathrobe on. That was his normal attire. tire when I would come to his house. I'll show you this. And he'd put the cigar in. He'd play so fast. And I didn't know what the hell he was doing. And I didn't have enough nerve to say, well, could you slow it down? And if he did, I wouldn't get that. So I started to learn by getting all the 78s of Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. And eventually I learned, because of playing in Bayeux, that Stride is a jazz style, and they didn't even play their own compositions. They wrote display pieces, because especially James P. would talk about Scott Joplin with a tremendous amount of respect, because when he was a kid... This is what he heard, and this is what he idolized. He would often say that euphonic sounds, which is another Scott Joplin piece, he said it was incredibly forward-thinking, because it's not of, if there is, a normal structure for ragtime where you have three themes. There are a lot of differences. In fact, the one he played, the last one he played, starts with what you could call a dominant theme rather than a tonic theme. But the standard ragtime... The thing, and it's too generalized, is a tonic theme, say you're in C, and then you do a dominant theme, which is a framework of G7, and then you repeat the tonic theme, and then you go up to F, and that would be the third theme. Now, Waller, and because of James P., And Lucky and Willie Lyon didn't adhere to this because they were starting to get different influences from pianists. James P. was incredibly modest, and he would just say, I was a good stealer, when he was incredibly facile. In any case, all the work I've done in stride as a pianist is to try to create my own style within the idiom. rather than play transcriptions of the great display pieces that the predecessors played. So I was thinking, what could I do to do examples of this? And I'll do three pretty short things. The first is I'll play you part of my version of Pork and Beans by Lucky Roberts. When was that written? Before the 1920s. 1911 or 1915. Yeah. And that could be considered one of the first Stride display pieces. And the way I play it is I played it the way James P. Johnson would play it, which was very different than what Lucky did. So I'll go over there and play a little and then explain the rest of it. Thank you. applause I was trying to figure out, Joe Jordan was... had cremated a lot of respect. He was a black member of the Clef Club, which was for legitimate black musicians. Society bands would come out of there. I don't think it was jazz yet. It was pre-jazz. But anyway, Joe Jordan was an arranger and I think had some successes. in a 1910 or... I googled it. I couldn't find out the date it was written. It's either 1907 or 1910. He wrote a thing called Sweetie Deer, which became successful as an early jazz piece. Sidney Bechet made a beautiful recording of it. So I thought, since this is 1910... I would play it in sort of a simulated, one chorus in a simulated ragtime style, and then my own arrangement, which would be a jazz style. And I first start off with the way Willie the Lion would use his own harmonies. He used to call it beautification. Don't play something like a southpaw, you know, like a truck driver. You've got to have beautification. Thank you. Thank you. Dick Hyman, who has taught me a lot, we've been friends since 1964, and I just have to... say what an honor it is to be on the same stage with him as always, and Mr. Morath, and everybody else here. I first met him because there was a mutual friend, another great pianist, Dick Wellstead, who I miss very much. And he said, you ought to... Yes. You ought to check out Dick Hyman. And I knew already, I was at RCA, you know, I was 22 years old. And he's doing a session in Studio C. You know, some pop, easy listening. thing. And he's a great reader, and he was big on the sessions. He could do anything he wanted perfectly. So I went in during a break, and I said, Dick Wellster tells me you can play James B. Johnson's jingles. So he starts going into it, right? During a break, you know, when the producer is talking to the arranger or something like that. Anyway, he once tried... I think it was one of the Beatles tunes when we were at his home in Montclair. So I've never forgot the idea, because in any jazz, a good song that gives you enough space can be used for almost any proper idiom. That's why nobody hears any Andrew Lloyd Webber jazz. Anyway, we can talk about that for a long time. So this is my version of Lady Madonna in stride. And for, well now it's not younger people, but I used to do this and they'd say, oh well then stride jazz, that's great. So you're playing that sort of style in this, you know, you play with more modern repertoire. Thank you. Well, the last gentleman on our panel here could probably play everything that all of us are playing. At the same time. At the same time. And I don't know where to begin to describe Dick Hyman. He's the quintessential studio guy. He plays everything. He plays all styles. He's done albums of, he did the complete recordings of Scott Joplin. What do we fear that was, 1975, I think? You did all those. And incidentally, they had a half an album that was unused, so he sat down and did improvisations on the Scott Joplin rags, which I'm hoping we're going to be able to get you to do today, one of those. But he's also recorded the James P. Johnson things, and he's made very creative recordings of also Jelly Roll Morton and about every other thing you can name. The stuff that... that I liked and he doesn't like. I'd ask you about those. He made some recordings under the name of... He used fake names for some of his ragtime albums. Do you have them all? Not all, but I have a few. You have a few. The best-known name of that group was Knuckles O2. although honestly I have to say that Billy Rowland was also Knuckles O'Toole but you were the best one I think I did more of them at any rate Billy Rowland was Perry Como's accompanist in those days Was there a third one? Was there somebody else to the dinner? Well, Slugger Ryan was another one that I did, another name I used. These names were given to me, I didn't think these things up. And another one was a very creative name, Rip Cord. Rip Cord. And Willie the Rock knocks. Now, the funny thing about all of these, they're all productions of Enoch Light, and they're all the same record. Oh, you put them all together. He had several different labels. He had one for Woolworths, for example, and he had a couple of others for specific markets, and he simply changed the names. So I was Slugger, I was Rip, and Willie the Rock and Knuckles at different times. I went over the same record. Slugger Ryan, you were also on television for that. There was a puppet series. Snarky Parker. I believe you're right. Snarky Parker. You can go online. Somebody's put up a YouTube thing, and you're playing behind whoever's the puppet, Slugger Ryan. Things that have appeared on YouTube are the funniest, and people have done cartoons and photographic sessions and all sorts of odd things. to old records of mine. You were playing The Naked... Oh, The Naked Dance. The Naked Dance, and it came out on a children's record, too. So I'm trying to find a place for children's. Riverside or something. I hope it's in the public domain. Well, we're going to shoot an interview with just Dick Hyman, and hopefully we can cover his career. Not here tonight. There's so many things that he's done. And, I mean, we could... we could have him play all different styles that are associated with ragtime and I've asked him to do a couple of things. Are you going to play one of those Knuckles O'Toole pieces that you composed? Well, I'll do something. A little bit? You know, the first requirement of a honky-tonk piano is that it has to be a terrible out-of-tune piano. So the studios at that time would get a hold of old upright pianos and they'd stick thumbtacks in the hammers. Or if they were more sophisticated, maybe staples. And since this is an excellent Steinway piano, in order to make it as bad as that, I'm... The ultimate pro. Prepared piano. It's not jangling enough, move it around a little bit. Terry gets percussion scale. I get a double scale on this for playing percussion. I'd ask you, there was a, as I say, there's many branches of the ragtime tree, and one of them is what we call novelty piano. And novelty was a style that... Probably was most exemplified by Zez Confrey, who was making piano rolls at the time, and he was looking for devices to make piano rolls more interesting. So he came up with these very interesting dissonant kind of things. And then there was a whole school. You could say in a way that probably George Gershwin was a devotee of novelty piano. And Dick has recorded some of the Zez Contre things, so I asked him if he would... Do you want to say a little bit about that for a bit? Yeah, just a bit. This, I suppose, was the most popular. novelty ragtime. It was also called in those days just syncopated music. Syncopation was the magic word that they thought of at that time. But it is said that Kitten on the Keys sold a million copies. It is said. Would that be correct, Max? I don't know. Zez Confrey recorded it a couple of different times at least, and not quite as aggressively as that. He thought it was prettier, I think. But at any rate, I would like to... I'd like to say that I came on Ragtime and Novelty Piano a little bit later. It was on account of Mr. Rifkin, and shortly after that... the success of the movie The Sting, that a lot of us got involved in Ragtime. And I found myself learning things, playing them. But until that time, I had considered myself the bebop. Bob kid. But what I really have enjoyed about Ragtime through the years is that it's become the basis for improvisations for me. For me personally, I'd rather not play it note for note but do some improvs such as this. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, all right, so I'm going to do an improv on your improvisation now. All right, I got to play now. You make it tough. Nobody likes to follow Dick Hyman. Nobody likes to. But I did want to show you a couple of other directions that Ragtime went into. And the first thing, we've been sort of edging around the whole idea of jazz, and we considered the stride piano players to be jazz players. Certainly what Dick was doing here with the improvisations were certainly jazz, but based on very modern sorts of ideas that have come along a lot later. But the guy who really turned ragtime into jazz, I think, was Jelly Roll Morton. He didn't put him in the ragtime camp, but he actually made differences between what ragtime was and the way it was played and what he did with it. And first of all, let me take this. over here. Let me hang myself first. There we go. Whereas we think of ragtime as being in two, one and two, one and two, and one and two, and Jell-O Morton thought about what he was doing, even when he had pieces that he called rags, he'd count his foot in four, four beat. So he'd be playing. He'd be counting twice as much with his foot and it gave it a different feel. He also added a bit of a Spanish feel and the way that he worked his chords around, he'd play in sixths instead of tenths. You heard the Stride guys, like Mike was doing here, were playing a tenth. Well, Jelly Roll would have been playing sixth instead of a tenth, and he would have been moving around and trying to play little figures here in the middle. So I'm going to play one of my favorite Jelly Roll Morton pieces. It was really the transition between ragtime and jazz. This is called The Pearls. The Pearls! And of course, the guy that influenced all of us was the amazing UB Blake. And UB Blake sort of predates everybody else. UB Blake knew Scott Joplin. He saw him performing back in about 1908. He also knew everybody else. He was the teacher of James P. Johnson and Lucky Roberts and all the rest of these people. He was before and after most everybody. He lived to be somewhere around 100 years old. We're not quite sure whether he was a full 100 when he died. I was very lucky that I got to study with U.B. Blake, and what a blessing that was. So I stayed at his house often during the summers, and I wrote down a... A bunch of his rags for publication, and we have these for sale back here, incidentally, if you want them, back in the 70s, and transcribed a lot of the things the way he played them. I'd like to play one of Yubi's pieces here. I guess I'm going to get Memories of You, which demonstrates a little ragtime in it, but it also shows the great wealth of styles that... that UB drew on. He played classical music and he played, you know, and he wrote for Broadway. This was, he had seven or eight Broadway shows, including the first all-black Broadway show that played for full prices, 1921, a show called Shuffle Along, which really started the Harlem Renaissance and an interest in black music that was called jazz at that time. And so you could say it really started the jazz era. So jazz becoming popular was from that show, Shuffle Along in 1921. But I'm going to get Memories of You for you right now, which was his other big standard hit that we still remember. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Thank you very much. There have been a lot of... compositions throughout the years, especially since we've had the revivals in the 70s. And I had been wanting to play a piece by Max Morath, which I'm not going to play, and I tried hard to do it, but I'm going to record it separately. He wrote a beautiful piece called The Golden Hours, which it's so tricky that I'm not going to try it here tonight. But I did... Thanks for trying it. Thanks for trying it. I gave it a try, but it's so tricky that I can't play it. But instead I'm going to play one of my pieces. That seems right. Which seems right. You want to hold this? Okay. Here's a composition, and Bill Baulkham wrote some popular things during the 70s. What was it? The one for his father. Graceful Ghost. Graceful Ghost, and there's been people, there's now a lot of younger people who are writing all sorts of ragtime compositions, and they move off in different directions. So here's the one that I've recorded that has had a certain amount of popularity. We put this out on an album for Musical Heritage Society where I had a bunch of ragtime pieces. I think it might even be available back here at the table. And they sent out, that's a classical label, Musical Heritage Society, so they sent these out to all of the classical radio stations in the country. And WQXR, for some reason, only played this one track, a piece that I wrote from the album, and I heard it on at least three different occasions. The tune is called Proctology. Thank you. Oh Thank you. So I don't know what we can follow that with. I would like to open it up for questions from you guys, for anybody up here, and maybe a little discussion of, I mean there's all kinds of topics of discussion. How are we going to do this? Are we going to have them come up and use a microphone? Donald Lambert was a very special pianist. and he had his own arrangements of all sorts of things. He was, when I was a kid, he was one of the best-striped pianists remaining, and he had a special way of playing. He also was a throwback to pre-Tin Pan Alley days because he would take Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and the Prelude to Wagner's Tannhäuser, and elegy and he would make his own stride versions of these and that's how I got in the record business because I lugged these old tube tape recorders to record him for posterity I must have been 17 or 18 when I started doing that and I'd go to this bar in Orange, New Jersey where he played on a terrible grand piano and I did this for several years getting quite a bit of it recording of him. He was very quiet and unfortunately like many such people, he must have drank maybe a pint and a half a day of straight booze. I once asked him, his favorite key was D flat. So I said to him, why do you play in D flat? He said, because it's an easy key. Which, when you're learning, it's not an easy key at all. Eventually, if you play enough in it. But, But he was a wonderful, wonderful person, and myself and many other. younger pianists studied through recordings of his there's one pianist in Europe, Louis Mazetier who's a very fine stride jazz pianist and he has transcribed Son of Donald Lambert's pieces note for note in any case I would sound different if it wasn't for Donald Lambert and I was blessed to be able to hang out with him and at this bar. All right. Do we have one more question from anybody? About any of this? Okay. Let me thank once again Seton Hanson for putting this together and Jazz at Lincoln Center for really making this a reality because you don't get this kind of event just anywhere. So we're, yes? I heard that. They're going to do Shuffle Along and What Happened Afterwards? No, that's the whole... It's Shuffle Along and What Followed. There's a caveat. It's not just Shuffle Along, they're going to tell a story about what happened. George Wolfe is producing that. So he can maybe do the same wonderful job to Yubi Blake that he did with Jelly Roll Martin. So, yes? There's a question about educating children in the future because kids really love to play reg, and how would some of the people on our panel suggest you approach rhythmically or approach this so that we do carry on this tradition to the next generation? What are some of the considerations that should be made rhythmically or in the approach to the field? First, you have to listen. People use sheet music alone, and sheet music, of course, is necessary because it's a lot more efficient than trying to do it the way I did by ear alone. But you also have to listen at the same time, listen to good recordings of the ragtime, and you can't start early enough. And if you do both, and you also might have a... teacher, there are methods of starting improvisation. We're doing a little bit of changing of the ragtime, not as brilliantly or as complicated as Dick Hyman just did, but just taking a few little liberties, such as Terry did with the pearls, which were wonderful. He didn't play it exactly note for note. He did something really tasteful. If you try to instill in them the listening and playing, of course they have to like it. and motivation is important. And do not allow video games on their block. Yeah, I've stopped playing the piano because my phone stopped ringing. And I used to tour. I did about 5,000 performances over the years. Counting the saloon jobs in Cripple Creek, Colorado for seven seasons. People ask me why I don't play the piano anymore, and I say I've lost interest. And I know that's probably shocking, but it was a job. And it was very good to me for a number of years. And I had three pianos, and I no longer have a piano. And it's okay. And I also have to tell you that if I had to play in the company of these guys tonight, I think I would have stayed in the men's room, you know. All right? Let me take one moment to say a question that I'm sure is in some of your minds and certainly has been in mine. And that is why do we have these five ancient white men up here talking about America's first black music. And I don't mean that as a criticism. I mean it because what Terry wanted to do this evening was to deal with the so-called revival. which started with The Sting, which started with the New York Public Library publications. It started around 1970 with Josh Rifkin. It started in 1960 with your television shows. Well, okay, thank you. But the point is, and I think we need to make this point. I can't find fault with any black musician of any age who has lost interest in ragtime. It's the good old days, and they don't need it. And what happened, of course, the names that succeeded Scott Joplin are Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington. Bud Powell. And on, in other words, the cutting edge of our music has been from those musicians. Okay, Scott Joplin, yeah, he was the first. And we honor that. But I think we should always bear in mind that some of us have spent a lot of time and had some success looking back. But a lot of wonderful musicians, including Thelonious Monk, and my gosh, you know, we all can name them, moved ahead. And I think this is a good place to remind ourselves of that. I think I'm gonna give up. I consider myself the avant-garde of nostalgia. Nostalgia is not what it used to be. Exactly. Forward into the past, we always say. All right, let me finish making my thank yous, and let's have another hand for all of these wonderful musicians. Dr. Rick Hammond, Mike Wittgen, Max Murad.

And the first recordings of it... We're by the Marine Band, a military band, and it's a syncopated march, and that's what we think about as quintessential ragtime music. It has syncopation continuously. That is, putting the accents on the offbeat.

Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. And that was the essence of ragtime. Nobody quite knows who the first person to do ragtime was.

It might have been Monteverdi, actually. We were in... you can hear in some of his music actually, syncopation, continuous syncopation, that you would have called ragtime, if you didn't know any better. The term rag, nobody could quite find out what the origin of that was.

Ben Harney claimed that he coined the phrase ragtime, and there's been newspaper accounts of the word rag going back as far as the 19th century. as the 1820s, and apparently it applied to the dance. You would attend a rag. And then so ragtime would have been the music that was applied to that.

Anyway, it became very popular in 1897. And there were rags like we just heard, which eventually became the classical rag of Scott Joplin. There were ragtime songs which had that kind of syncopation. So ragtime was everywhere, and it became the popular music of the turn of the century until about 1917 when the word jazz sort of came in. and usurp that idea. So we're going to hear many styles of ragtime, and I've been so fortunate to be able to assemble some of the people who are responsible for the way that we think about ragtime and who really sort of gave the idea of what ragtime was back as far as the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, all of that.

And... I purposely just got the old guys here. I didn't bring any youngsters into the thing.

We still got what it takes to stomp them, except for my first guest. And the gentleman I would like to introduce first is the man who who really, I would say, got me interested in ragtime. And that was back as early as 1960. And he did so much to present ragtime in the media, to make music available, this stuff, the sheet music was not available anyplace.

He popularized it, he did shows, he did theatrical shows, and he played great. Now... He's told me that he's not, he just sold all of his pianos and so he's not playing.

He's the only one that's not playing, but he's a marvelous raconteur, among other things. And I think he can give you the story from his point of view when he got started doing a couple of great television shows in 1960 and before that. Will you welcome Max Morath.

Thank you, Terry. Forgive me if I'm reading. I learned a long time ago that you should script your ad libs. Terry has asked us to deal, essentially, up here with the so-called revival of Ragtime, which to many people started around 1970 with the New York Public Library publication of Scott Joplin with The Sting and so forth. So we'll be doing that, and I can tell you...

that all of us up here, all five of us, during the so-called revival period, played a lot of what they used to call honky-tonk or ricky-tick or rinky-tink piano. Now it's called ragtime. And all of us can testify that we played every bad piano in the United States.

I gotta tell you, you'd go to one place and there'd be a nice fine Steinway. Grand. The next time you're playing a Wurlitzer spinet in an arrest home that hasn't been tuned since the Eisenhower administration.

And I can tell you that one time, all of us, I think, when we're going to go play a concert, we'd call up and say, what's the piano? Tell me about the piano. And hope. And I, when I was still living in Denver, I did a series of programs for a big grocery chain that had stores all over northern Colorado and Wyoming. And I remember playing a show in Landers, Wyoming.

I called up the guy and I said, tell me about the piano. He says, don't worry, Mr. Morath. He said, you're going to love our piano. We just had it painted. So that said, Terry has asked me to do two things.

One of them is to briefly tell you how I got interested in this music, and then to discuss briefly the television programs that we did for, at that time, NET, before PBS. I discovered a song when I was just working in the saloons called I'm Certainly Living a Ragtime Life, published in 1900 by a couple of guys in Chicago. It had some words like, I've got a ragtime dog and a ragtime cat, a ragtime piano in my ragtime flat. And I added some words to that, which are relevant. I said, I'm going to rag till morning and then we'll all stay up drinking ragtime whiskey from a ragtime cup.

And that was a veiled salute to the first ragtimer in my family. No, not my mother. It was her oldest brother, my uncle, Richard Ramsel. He was my ragtime godfather, and I'll tell you why.

He never knew it. His little sister, my mother, Gladys Ramsel, was a school pianist, and she played the rags, played them well. The Ramsels were from Ottumwa, Iowa. Gladys, my mother, the youngest of a family of eight. My uncle Dick, the oldest brother by 15 years.

He was a 19th century Renaissance man. Artist, poet. lawyer, the family alcoholic, and a wicked pianist, especially when he'd had a couple of those ragtime cups.

Anyway... He never learned to read music. So he'd buy the new sheet music and he'd bring it home.

And we're talking the 1900s when all the good stuff was being written. Early 1900s. He'd bring them home for my mother, his little sister, Gladys, to read them and play them.

By the time she was 12, she could read like a bandit. So her big brother would listen a couple of times. And then he'd sit down and play them by ear. in his own key, which was probably either F sharp or C.

All air players play either in all the white notes or all the black notes. And many of those precious sheets of that great ragtime were still in our piano bench when I was growing up, because my mother took them with her when she moved to Colorado. And she played in the silent movies out there, by the way, at the Princess Theater in Colorado Springs, Colorado. And then she became a professional journalist. And I've always been proud that my mom not only knew how to spell, but had a great left hand.

And, okay, that piano bench with all those old rags, he bought the good stuff for her to play. He bought the Maple Leaf rag, of course. And then Scott Joplin's original rags, Easy Winners, that beautiful piece.

Sensation. And she had one of those priceless John Stark folios, you know, with great stuff like James Scott's Hilarity Rag and Joe Lam's American Beauty. So if you were learning to play the piano when you were a kid and you were taking kid piano lessons, which I did, you heard your mother play those rags.

You had to learn them. Ragtime insists. It's piano music you can't resist.

Nobody forced you to, by the way, but nobody stopped me. My mother said, sure, and my dear piano teacher, a liberal-minded woman by the name of Gladys Wardwell, realized that rags were essential to piano, and she said, that's fine, they're good exercises, they're better than Hannon or Cherney. So that's what I did. A treasured memory, to get back to my uncle just for a moment.

When I was nine years old, we spent part of a summer in Iowa, and he still lived on the farm outside of town. First experience, by the way, was the Kerosene Land War Privy. And my Uncle Max was also in town, and those guys showed me how to kill a chicken by wringing its neck, and also how to play pinochle.

But I heard some ragtime. One night, I heard my Uncle Dick play the rags that he had learned by ear. They still had a good piano, big old Somer upright, in good tune, good ivories.

And when he played, in my memory, he sat down and he first played the melodies. He played the right hands, like songs. Then he'd begin to add the left hand and start to syncopate. And he'd swing out in perfect time.

And that combination, and I tell you this because a lot of people really don't realize this, but at that time, and I'm nine years old, I realized that ragtime is music. I think that's not often said, and it's music. Okay, now.

Fast forward to the 1950s. I'm working in radio and TV, jazz dates, piano bars, saloons, like we all did. And I'm putting in summers as the musical director of the Imperial Players, Cripple Creek, Colorado. We did melodramas, Curse You Villain, Lily the Felon's Daughter, or More Sinned Against Than Sinning.

And you had to learn all the old tunes, and of course I began to do rags. But ragtime was waiting in the wings in that theater and television, because our stage manager, a fellow there by the name of Moss Hall, got a job right away in 1959 as a producer of Denver's public television station. He called me up one day and he said, let's together, he said they wanted pilots, they're trying to get some...

entertainment values into educational television. And he said, they'll pay you. I said, I'm good.

And we did a pilot film. which we called before jazz, but they renamed happily the ragtime era. And Terry has asked me to tell you just a little about how those programs came about.

So here goes. In the next two years, we made a total of 28 half-hour programs about the music, but also about the life and times of America during those early years of the 20th century, as seen through the music. We dubbed the whole turn-of-the-century period as the the ragtime era and we were getting a lot of good national publicity but here's the reason and it has nothing to do with the music i like to think that the success of ragtime in my view for those public television shows which were shown here in new york for 10 years had to do with technology not music We did those things right at the time when videotape, which had not come along yet, we were still doing, if some of you remember the terrible old kinescope films that we saw on television when we saw Ed Sullivan, or, you know, they were terrible. But videotape changed everything, and our series was the first series, fall of 1959, to be distributed nationally on...

Ampex reel-to-reel videotapes and the quality was astonishingly good. And the people at Ampex who did the machine gave 60 of their new Ampex videotapes to the existing 60 stations, which were not PBS yet, you know. PBS didn't come until 1967. This was National Educational Television based in Ann Arbor. But these were distributed nationally to a lot of these little tiny stations.

And the big videotapes were difficult to handle. You'd get rollovers and you'd get bad quality and you'd get dropouts and all that. But our chief engineer in Denver, which was one of the main producers for the network, mastered the Ampex reel-to-reel. Before long, all of these other 60 stations were flying my good friend Scotty Cullen, chief engineer. Help!

We need help with these videotapes! So he'd get on an airplane with his carry-on, with the Ampex instruction book, and a copy of the ragtime years. And the other thing that turned a corner for us, this is 1960 now, there was no public station. in New York. WNED did not exist.

So those programs were aired on Channel 9, WOR. Suddenly we're getting reviewed in the New York Times, we're getting reviewed, we're getting copy in Newsweek and so forth. And my phone began to ring. And that's the story of those shows.

Max has left out a lot of the things that he did to help promote ragtime in those days. He was all over radio. He used to be on the Author Godfrey program, what, about three times a week? You were on the Author Godfrey program?

Oh yeah, the radio show. I never did TV with him. Yeah, but you did the radio show. I used to hear him and he was doing all these ragtime songs and playing the rags. That's right.

He put together a quartet during the 60s. It was mainly strings and did a lot of these rags and then played in the Village, right, the Village Gate? Vanguard. Vanguard, Village Vanguard. Popularized it in all kinds.

He was on the Bell Telephone Hour. He really represented ragtime, and not just with those shows, but continuing. And then, as I mentioned, you were on Broadway with a...

show. Never on Broadway. Off Broadway.

That other place. Oh yeah. Okay. I take that back then. Off Broadway.

This is off Broadway now. That's right. So our next guest up here is a man who I think really changed and added to the way we thought of ragtime. Incidentally, you can get all this story in the book, This is Ragtime.

But in the 70s, in New York, ragtime was rediscovered. And a couple of people had a lot to do with it. Bill Volcom was one person who became interested in it.

There was the publication of the Scott Joplin rags, almost the complete collection of those that came out. They rediscovered Scott Joplin's opera, and that was produced during the 70s also. But the main thing that really caught fire was an album of Scott Joplin rags that was played by Joshua Rifkin, our guest here. And Joshua, if you would tell the story yourself, that would be great. Thank you so much.

Distinct work. Okay, it's on. First of all, I just want to say it's a great pleasure and honor to be here, especially with this wonderful cast of colleagues, people I've...

Just to be here with this wonderful cast of musicians, people I've admired for so long. A little bit about how I came to the music. I had, for the most part, a fairly conventional classical music upbringing in New York, but I did have an older brother who was very interested in early jazz, and who played it, in fact.

He played the cornet and trumpet, and he needed somebody to accompany him, and he had a younger brother who took piano lessons and had a fair amount of pianistic ability, so he kind of press-ganged me into service doing this. And in the course of this and over the next few years, I came to know quite a bit of early jazz. I had the good fortune to meet and sometimes play with several of the survivors of the New Orleans and Chicago jazz scenes. It was a wonderful, heady education.

And of course, I came across Scott Choplin some in this process as well. We tended, at that time, many of us, to look at Joplin as kind of a sort of precursor of jazz, or see him through jazz-tinted lenses, and certainly when I played Joplin in those days, it was very much the way a New Orleans jazz pianist would do it. Then the music fell out of my horizon until, in the late 1960s, I was sort of brought back to it by two...

good friends, two composer friends of mine, Eric Salzman and Bill Balkum. And Eric and Bill had both become extremely taken with Joplin in particular, and I lived at the time around the corner from Eric in Brooklyn Heights. And, you know, one day Eric says to me, look, I have this wonderful music, Scott Joplin, and I say sort of, oh, Scott Joplin, I know that. And I look at the music and I think, no, I don't know this.

I saw something completely different from what I had thought I'd seen before. I started to play this music and you know this was a wonderful composer, a man who just had endless inspiration, endless ideas, a wonderful range of expression and I just got completely carried away with it as happens to just about anybody who really becomes acquainted with this stuff and I played it at every chance I could get and Bill and I played things together and gave performances together etc. Just by chance, I was working for a record company, Nonsuch Records, doing production work and also making recordings for them, and I had a certain freedom to record whatever I wanted to, as long as it wasn't too expensive.

And I came to them one day and said, well, you know, I've been doing 15th century French secular music and 17th century German music, etc., but... This is Joplin, this is wonderful stuff, we should really do it, and I think I can, you know, get you a good deal on The Pianist. So they agreed, and we did it, and I should explain something about how Nonsuch worked in those days.

This is a very different era, but we didn't do any marketing, any advertising, any promotion. We just made the records and we put them out on the market to die. We certainly thought no different about this, to be very honest. We were all very taken with the music, but we had no idea what was going to happen with it.

I thought maybe, you know, instead of selling 200 copies like, you know, 15th century French secular music might do 400 copies. So we were totally, totally, totally, totally taken aback by the response to it. It seemed to unleash something.

And it seemed obviously to... speak to something that was there waiting to be spoken to in a lot of the American musical public. And then what happens is, of course, pretty much known to everybody, so I won't go into that, but that gives you the background of how that particular wrinkle in this particular chapter got wrinkled and made its way. Thank you. I want to hear two tunes in particular that you recorded, and you will know them immediately.

Because the other thing that happened, after his record came out, and it was played on all stations. It was on classical stations, it was popular music, it was everywhere. Especially the recording of The Entertainer, which is the one that I don't think it sold that much when it first came out. when it was first published by Joplin in, what was it, 1904? 1902, I believe.

1902 or something like that. But suddenly with his recording, it became enormously popular, and that's what really popularized ragtime. And it was put in a movie called The Sting.

You all sit there and say, yes, you remember that. Well, that was his fault. You want to talk about that? I'm just going to say a couple of things about The Entertainer. In fact, that was the first Joplin piece I ever came across.

Maybe together with Maple Leaf Rag. There was an old recording of it by a jazz band led by Bunk Johnson, who had been a great trumpeter in New Orleans in the very old days and then was rediscovered as an old man and made... recordings in the late 1940s and one of them was basically the red back book arrangement of The Entertainer played with a very light delicate swing by Johnson and his colleagues and that I knew from very early on.

But I have to give some credit here to Bill Baulkham because it was Bill whom I first heard play it and I may not have rediscovered it without Bill. And I was absolutely taken with it when I first heard Bill play it, and to a certain extent, to be very honest, all my life I've been trying to get back and capture what it was that I heard Bill do when he first did it in my hearing. But I was so taken with it that I in fact asked that we begin the first Joplin album with it. I said, I really want this to be the first thing on the album. Everybody said, no, no, no, no, no, nobody's ever going to go for this.

We have to start with Maple Leaf Rag. Well, Maple Leaf Rag is a wonderful piece, and chronologically it was, of course, the appropriate piece with which to begin. But in fact, there was skepticism about the entertainer at the time. Little did they know. Little did they know, indeed.

And the other piece that also you first made popular was Solace, which was an unusual Joplin. It's called Hold a Mexican Ceramide, right? Yes, it's a very unusual piece. And again, I can claim really little credit there in the sense that I was not taken with solace when I first came across it. I think Martin Williams of the Smithsonian sent it up to me.

He said, I should, by the way, mention that this happened before the New York Public Library edition. So we were still sort of like getting bootleg copies, samizdat copies of Joplin and trying to assemble the work. you know, the corpus of the works as much as we could.

So Martin Williams sent this to me and said, you know, I think it's a beautiful piece. And I remember that a composer friend of mine was visiting and he was also very fascinated with ragtime. And I played this. And to my eternal shame, you know, full disclosure, I played it and I said, I don't think this is absolutely first class Joplin. What was I thinking?

And he immediately said, oh, this is wonderful. And of course, pretty soon I did get persuaded. Mike wants to know if he can ask you a question, and no, you may not.

When I heard your recording on Nonsuch, it seemed to me to take a different attitude and treatment to this wonderful music than what we'd been hearing before. And I just was wondering what, you know, I thought it was just great, and I knew as an old record producer that it was an ingenious way to handle it. Because, to be blunt, you would get the people that have a Mondrian print and listen to Vivaldi. And anyway, I was just wondering why you chose to interpret the material the way you did. or how you...

I have been asked that question both positively and negatively many times in my life. Well, this is positive. No, that's extremely kind, Mike. I don't know how much of a conscious choice it was. As I say, when I became reacquainted with it through Eric and Bill, I did see it through a very different lens.

And I think what I saw... there was the, if you will, the composed music. I mean, I had improvised and all of that stuff before, but I saw just how fastidiously made the music was. And from everything I could find out, ragtime was basically a music that was played. according to the notes, unlike jazz, etc.

And the rest, I think, just came out of my own predilections as a musician and how I responded to what I was seeing there. It just seemed to me what the music was saying. Over the years, things have modified. They have to.

You never play anything quite the same way. But... That's just the way the music spoke to me. And I hope it speaks to some other people as well. Could you play a couple pieces for us so we can hear what it sounded like?

The Joplin that changed the world. Here we go. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

And now we're going to shift gears quite a bit and I'm going to introduce an old friend of mine who was digging into an offshoot of ragtime. which we would call stride piano. And the interesting thing about ragtime to me, and I think ragtime was the first jazz. I think you could make an argument that ragtime was...

jazz was a kind of ragtime. but ragtime is really the fundamental part of it. But some of the early piano players, I would say U.B. Blake might have been the grandfather of stride piano.

You can make a pretty good argument in that case. But a branch of ragtime that was developed on the East Coast... Among the various piano players, it became known as Stride. James P. Johnson was the guy that we call the father of Stride piano.

Fats Waller was another one. And then that style is also... in Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk. Stride piano, which often was developed in Harlem, permeates a lot of the piano styles.

that come later. Well, the gentleman that I'm going to introduce to you right now, as a kid, started contacting a lot of the early piano players. He spent time with UB Blake, with Willie the Lion Smith, with Cliff Jackson, a number of the piano players, and really learned stride piano. Not only that, he became a record producer for RCA, among others, and produced albums of this stuff.

The Vintage Series on RCA. That was Mike Lipskin here. So during the...

When did you start? In the 60s? 64. And then of course through the 70s when ragtime became popular we were on an album together with UB Blake at one point where he had three of the UB's protégés doing a live concert. But Mike is really the guy that really has dug into stride piano. And so I would like to introduce him now to talk about how he got into it and maybe what the differences are between ragtime and stride.

And you can use the piano as you wish. Mike Lipskin. Thank you.

Thank you. I want to thank Terry for including me in this, and I want to thank Seton Hawkins, who, without him, we would have all fallen apart. He worked very hard to coordinate and get all this together. Anyway, when I was four, about four or five, I'd be left alone.

My father had been, first, a newspaper reporter, a police blotter in Harlem, and he loved... black music, so he'd go to these clubs and he would hear Willie the Lion and James P. Johnson. He didn't know what they were doing. In fact, I don't even think it was called Stride Piano then.

But he heard it, and so we had Fletcher Henderson and Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, 78s at home. And if you were careful and you didn't break them, they were easy to play. They were a lot easier than an LP for a five-year-old to not ruin. by putting it on this tabletop Ansley phonograph we had.

So I heard the Fats Waller piano solo in Christopher Columbus and it was a visceral feeling that I had. It was almost a musical orgasm, I guess you could call it, for want of a better term. I forgot, this is a family program.

Anyway, so... I got the bug that early, and I eventually wanted to learn. So by the time I was 12, my father was kind enough to take me to places where Willie the Lion would play.

I'd read in the New Yorker that he was one of the last of the Stride pianists, and I met him, and we became friends. Then I had enough nerve because of this thirst to call up in the phone book. They were in the phone book.

Cliff Jackson, Lucky Roberts, UB, Willie Gant. It is true. These people, they were just sitting at home.

Bop was in, and nobody called them, so they were very happy to have a young, you know, a 16-year-old or a 14-year-old come up and hang out with them. And not only did I learn osmotically stride, because I don't read well, I spent a lot of time with Willie, but Willie would go over to the piano, he'd have a cigar and his derby and his pajamas and his bathrobe on. That was his normal attire. tire when I would come to his house. I'll show you this.

And he'd put the cigar in. He'd play so fast. And I didn't know what the hell he was doing. And I didn't have enough nerve to say, well, could you slow it down?

And if he did, I wouldn't get that. So I started to learn by getting all the 78s of Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. And eventually I learned, because of playing in Bayeux, that Stride is a jazz style, and they didn't even play their own compositions. They wrote display pieces, because especially James P. would talk about Scott Joplin with a tremendous amount of respect, because when he was a kid...

This is what he heard, and this is what he idolized. He would often say that euphonic sounds, which is another Scott Joplin piece, he said it was incredibly forward-thinking, because it's not of, if there is, a normal structure for ragtime where you have three themes. There are a lot of differences.

In fact, the one he played, the last one he played, starts with what you could call a dominant theme rather than a tonic theme. But the standard ragtime... The thing, and it's too generalized, is a tonic theme, say you're in C, and then you do a dominant theme, which is a framework of G7, and then you repeat the tonic theme, and then you go up to F, and that would be the third theme. Now, Waller, and because of James P., And Lucky and Willie Lyon didn't adhere to this because they were starting to get different influences from pianists.

James P. was incredibly modest, and he would just say, I was a good stealer, when he was incredibly facile. In any case, all the work I've done in stride as a pianist is to try to create my own style within the idiom. rather than play transcriptions of the great display pieces that the predecessors played. So I was thinking, what could I do to do examples of this?

And I'll do three pretty short things. The first is I'll play you part of my version of Pork and Beans by Lucky Roberts. When was that written? Before the 1920s. 1911 or 1915. Yeah.

And that could be considered one of the first Stride display pieces. And the way I play it is I played it the way James P. Johnson would play it, which was very different than what Lucky did. So I'll go over there and play a little and then explain the rest of it. Thank you. applause I was trying to figure out, Joe Jordan was...

had cremated a lot of respect. He was a black member of the Clef Club, which was for legitimate black musicians. Society bands would come out of there.

I don't think it was jazz yet. It was pre-jazz. But anyway, Joe Jordan was an arranger and I think had some successes.

in a 1910 or... I googled it. I couldn't find out the date it was written. It's either 1907 or 1910. He wrote a thing called Sweetie Deer, which became successful as an early jazz piece.

Sidney Bechet made a beautiful recording of it. So I thought, since this is 1910... I would play it in sort of a simulated, one chorus in a simulated ragtime style, and then my own arrangement, which would be a jazz style.

And I first start off with the way Willie the Lion would use his own harmonies. He used to call it beautification. Don't play something like a southpaw, you know, like a truck driver.

You've got to have beautification. Thank you. Thank you.

Dick Hyman, who has taught me a lot, we've been friends since 1964, and I just have to... say what an honor it is to be on the same stage with him as always, and Mr. Morath, and everybody else here. I first met him because there was a mutual friend, another great pianist, Dick Wellstead, who I miss very much.

And he said, you ought to... Yes. You ought to check out Dick Hyman. And I knew already, I was at RCA, you know, I was 22 years old.

And he's doing a session in Studio C. You know, some pop, easy listening. thing. And he's a great reader, and he was big on the sessions. He could do anything he wanted perfectly.

So I went in during a break, and I said, Dick Wellster tells me you can play James B. Johnson's jingles. So he starts going into it, right? During a break, you know, when the producer is talking to the arranger or something like that. Anyway, he once tried... I think it was one of the Beatles tunes when we were at his home in Montclair.

So I've never forgot the idea, because in any jazz, a good song that gives you enough space can be used for almost any proper idiom. That's why nobody hears any Andrew Lloyd Webber jazz. Anyway, we can talk about that for a long time.

So this is my version of Lady Madonna in stride. And for, well now it's not younger people, but I used to do this and they'd say, oh well then stride jazz, that's great. So you're playing that sort of style in this, you know, you play with more modern repertoire.

Thank you. Well, the last gentleman on our panel here could probably play everything that all of us are playing. At the same time.

At the same time. And I don't know where to begin to describe Dick Hyman. He's the quintessential studio guy.

He plays everything. He plays all styles. He's done albums of, he did the complete recordings of Scott Joplin. What do we fear that was, 1975, I think?

You did all those. And incidentally, they had a half an album that was unused, so he sat down and did improvisations on the Scott Joplin rags, which I'm hoping we're going to be able to get you to do today, one of those. But he's also recorded the James P. Johnson things, and he's made very creative recordings of also Jelly Roll Morton and about every other thing you can name. The stuff that...

that I liked and he doesn't like. I'd ask you about those. He made some recordings under the name of... He used fake names for some of his ragtime albums.

Do you have them all? Not all, but I have a few. You have a few. The best-known name of that group was Knuckles O2.

although honestly I have to say that Billy Rowland was also Knuckles O'Toole but you were the best one I think I did more of them at any rate Billy Rowland was Perry Como's accompanist in those days Was there a third one? Was there somebody else to the dinner? Well, Slugger Ryan was another one that I did, another name I used.

These names were given to me, I didn't think these things up. And another one was a very creative name, Rip Cord. Rip Cord.

And Willie the Rock knocks. Now, the funny thing about all of these, they're all productions of Enoch Light, and they're all the same record. Oh, you put them all together. He had several different labels.

He had one for Woolworths, for example, and he had a couple of others for specific markets, and he simply changed the names. So I was Slugger, I was Rip, and Willie the Rock and Knuckles at different times. I went over the same record.

Slugger Ryan, you were also on television for that. There was a puppet series. Snarky Parker. I believe you're right. Snarky Parker.

You can go online. Somebody's put up a YouTube thing, and you're playing behind whoever's the puppet, Slugger Ryan. Things that have appeared on YouTube are the funniest, and people have done cartoons and photographic sessions and all sorts of odd things. to old records of mine. You were playing The Naked...

Oh, The Naked Dance. The Naked Dance, and it came out on a children's record, too. So I'm trying to find a place for children's. Riverside or something. I hope it's in the public domain.

Well, we're going to shoot an interview with just Dick Hyman, and hopefully we can cover his career. Not here tonight. There's so many things that he's done. And, I mean, we could...

we could have him play all different styles that are associated with ragtime and I've asked him to do a couple of things. Are you going to play one of those Knuckles O'Toole pieces that you composed? Well, I'll do something.

A little bit? You know, the first requirement of a honky-tonk piano is that it has to be a terrible out-of-tune piano. So the studios at that time would get a hold of old upright pianos and they'd stick thumbtacks in the hammers.

Or if they were more sophisticated, maybe staples. And since this is an excellent Steinway piano, in order to make it as bad as that, I'm... The ultimate pro.

Prepared piano. It's not jangling enough, move it around a little bit. Terry gets percussion scale. I get a double scale on this for playing percussion.

I'd ask you, there was a, as I say, there's many branches of the ragtime tree, and one of them is what we call novelty piano. And novelty was a style that... Probably was most exemplified by Zez Confrey, who was making piano rolls at the time, and he was looking for devices to make piano rolls more interesting.

So he came up with these very interesting dissonant kind of things. And then there was a whole school. You could say in a way that probably George Gershwin was a devotee of novelty piano.

And Dick has recorded some of the Zez Contre things, so I asked him if he would... Do you want to say a little bit about that for a bit? Yeah, just a bit.

This, I suppose, was the most popular. novelty ragtime. It was also called in those days just syncopated music. Syncopation was the magic word that they thought of at that time.

But it is said that Kitten on the Keys sold a million copies. It is said. Would that be correct, Max?

I don't know. Zez Confrey recorded it a couple of different times at least, and not quite as aggressively as that. He thought it was prettier, I think. But at any rate, I would like to... I'd like to say that I came on Ragtime and Novelty Piano a little bit later.

It was on account of Mr. Rifkin, and shortly after that... the success of the movie The Sting, that a lot of us got involved in Ragtime. And I found myself learning things, playing them. But until that time, I had considered myself the bebop.

Bob kid. But what I really have enjoyed about Ragtime through the years is that it's become the basis for improvisations for me. For me personally, I'd rather not play it note for note but do some improvs such as this.

Thank you. Thank you. Oh, all right, so I'm going to do an improv on your improvisation now. All right, I got to play now. You make it tough.

Nobody likes to follow Dick Hyman. Nobody likes to. But I did want to show you a couple of other directions that Ragtime went into.

And the first thing, we've been sort of edging around the whole idea of jazz, and we considered the stride piano players to be jazz players. Certainly what Dick was doing here with the improvisations were certainly jazz, but based on very modern sorts of ideas that have come along a lot later. But the guy who really turned ragtime into jazz, I think, was Jelly Roll Morton.

He didn't put him in the ragtime camp, but he actually made differences between what ragtime was and the way it was played and what he did with it. And first of all, let me take this. over here.

Let me hang myself first. There we go. Whereas we think of ragtime as being in two, one and two, one and two, and one and two, and Jell-O Morton thought about what he was doing, even when he had pieces that he called rags, he'd count his foot in four, four beat.

So he'd be playing. He'd be counting twice as much with his foot and it gave it a different feel. He also added a bit of a Spanish feel and the way that he worked his chords around, he'd play in sixths instead of tenths. You heard the Stride guys, like Mike was doing here, were playing a tenth.

Well, Jelly Roll would have been playing sixth instead of a tenth, and he would have been moving around and trying to play little figures here in the middle. So I'm going to play one of my favorite Jelly Roll Morton pieces. It was really the transition between ragtime and jazz.

This is called The Pearls. The Pearls! And of course, the guy that influenced all of us was the amazing UB Blake.

And UB Blake sort of predates everybody else. UB Blake knew Scott Joplin. He saw him performing back in about 1908. He also knew everybody else. He was the teacher of James P. Johnson and Lucky Roberts and all the rest of these people. He was before and after most everybody.

He lived to be somewhere around 100 years old. We're not quite sure whether he was a full 100 when he died. I was very lucky that I got to study with U.B.

Blake, and what a blessing that was. So I stayed at his house often during the summers, and I wrote down a... A bunch of his rags for publication, and we have these for sale back here, incidentally, if you want them, back in the 70s, and transcribed a lot of the things the way he played them. I'd like to play one of Yubi's pieces here. I guess I'm going to get Memories of You, which demonstrates a little ragtime in it, but it also shows the great wealth of styles that...

that UB drew on. He played classical music and he played, you know, and he wrote for Broadway. This was, he had seven or eight Broadway shows, including the first all-black Broadway show that played for full prices, 1921, a show called Shuffle Along, which really started the Harlem Renaissance and an interest in black music that was called jazz at that time. And so you could say it really started the jazz era. So jazz becoming popular was from that show, Shuffle Along in 1921. But I'm going to get Memories of You for you right now, which was his other big standard hit that we still remember.

Thank you. Bye. Thank you.

Thank you very much. There have been a lot of... compositions throughout the years, especially since we've had the revivals in the 70s.

And I had been wanting to play a piece by Max Morath, which I'm not going to play, and I tried hard to do it, but I'm going to record it separately. He wrote a beautiful piece called The Golden Hours, which it's so tricky that I'm not going to try it here tonight. But I did...

Thanks for trying it. Thanks for trying it. I gave it a try, but it's so tricky that I can't play it. But instead I'm going to play one of my pieces. That seems right.

Which seems right. You want to hold this? Okay. Here's a composition, and Bill Baulkham wrote some popular things during the 70s. What was it?

The one for his father. Graceful Ghost. Graceful Ghost, and there's been people, there's now a lot of younger people who are writing all sorts of ragtime compositions, and they move off in different directions.

So here's the one that I've recorded that has had a certain amount of popularity. We put this out on an album for Musical Heritage Society where I had a bunch of ragtime pieces. I think it might even be available back here at the table.

And they sent out, that's a classical label, Musical Heritage Society, so they sent these out to all of the classical radio stations in the country. And WQXR, for some reason, only played this one track, a piece that I wrote from the album, and I heard it on at least three different occasions. The tune is called Proctology.

Thank you. Oh Thank you. So I don't know what we can follow that with. I would like to open it up for questions from you guys, for anybody up here, and maybe a little discussion of, I mean there's all kinds of topics of discussion. How are we going to do this?

Are we going to have them come up and use a microphone? Donald Lambert was a very special pianist. and he had his own arrangements of all sorts of things. He was, when I was a kid, he was one of the best-striped pianists remaining, and he had a special way of playing.

He also was a throwback to pre-Tin Pan Alley days because he would take Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and the Prelude to Wagner's Tannhäuser, and elegy and he would make his own stride versions of these and that's how I got in the record business because I lugged these old tube tape recorders to record him for posterity I must have been 17 or 18 when I started doing that and I'd go to this bar in Orange, New Jersey where he played on a terrible grand piano and I did this for several years getting quite a bit of it recording of him. He was very quiet and unfortunately like many such people, he must have drank maybe a pint and a half a day of straight booze. I once asked him, his favorite key was D flat.

So I said to him, why do you play in D flat? He said, because it's an easy key. Which, when you're learning, it's not an easy key at all.

Eventually, if you play enough in it. But, But he was a wonderful, wonderful person, and myself and many other. younger pianists studied through recordings of his there's one pianist in Europe, Louis Mazetier who's a very fine stride jazz pianist and he has transcribed Son of Donald Lambert's pieces note for note in any case I would sound different if it wasn't for Donald Lambert and I was blessed to be able to hang out with him and at this bar.

All right. Do we have one more question from anybody? About any of this? Okay. Let me thank once again Seton Hanson for putting this together and Jazz at Lincoln Center for really making this a reality because you don't get this kind of event just anywhere.

So we're, yes? I heard that. They're going to do Shuffle Along and What Happened Afterwards? No, that's the whole... It's Shuffle Along and What Followed.

There's a caveat. It's not just Shuffle Along, they're going to tell a story about what happened. George Wolfe is producing that. So he can maybe do the same wonderful job to Yubi Blake that he did with Jelly Roll Martin.

So, yes? There's a question about educating children in the future because kids really love to play reg, and how would some of the people on our panel suggest you approach rhythmically or approach this so that we do carry on this tradition to the next generation? What are some of the considerations that should be made rhythmically or in the approach to the field? First, you have to listen. People use sheet music alone, and sheet music, of course, is necessary because it's a lot more efficient than trying to do it the way I did by ear alone.

But you also have to listen at the same time, listen to good recordings of the ragtime, and you can't start early enough. And if you do both, and you also might have a... teacher, there are methods of starting improvisation. We're doing a little bit of changing of the ragtime, not as brilliantly or as complicated as Dick Hyman just did, but just taking a few little liberties, such as Terry did with the pearls, which were wonderful.

He didn't play it exactly note for note. He did something really tasteful. If you try to instill in them the listening and playing, of course they have to like it. and motivation is important. And do not allow video games on their block.

Yeah, I've stopped playing the piano because my phone stopped ringing. And I used to tour. I did about 5,000 performances over the years. Counting the saloon jobs in Cripple Creek, Colorado for seven seasons. People ask me why I don't play the piano anymore, and I say I've lost interest.

And I know that's probably shocking, but it was a job. And it was very good to me for a number of years. And I had three pianos, and I no longer have a piano. And it's okay. And I also have to tell you that if I had to play in the company of these guys tonight, I think I would have stayed in the men's room, you know.

All right? Let me take one moment to say a question that I'm sure is in some of your minds and certainly has been in mine. And that is why do we have these five ancient white men up here talking about America's first black music.

And I don't mean that as a criticism. I mean it because what Terry wanted to do this evening was to deal with the so-called revival. which started with The Sting, which started with the New York Public Library publications. It started around 1970 with Josh Rifkin.

It started in 1960 with your television shows. Well, okay, thank you. But the point is, and I think we need to make this point.

I can't find fault with any black musician of any age who has lost interest in ragtime. It's the good old days, and they don't need it. And what happened, of course, the names that succeeded Scott Joplin are Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington.

Bud Powell. And on, in other words, the cutting edge of our music has been from those musicians. Okay, Scott Joplin, yeah, he was the first. And we honor that. But I think we should always bear in mind that some of us have spent a lot of time and had some success looking back.

But a lot of wonderful musicians, including Thelonious Monk, and my gosh, you know, we all can name them, moved ahead. And I think this is a good place to remind ourselves of that. I think I'm gonna give up. I consider myself the avant-garde of nostalgia. Nostalgia is not what it used to be.

Exactly. Forward into the past, we always say. All right, let me finish making my thank yous, and let's have another hand for all of these wonderful musicians. Dr. Rick Hammond, Mike Wittgen, Max Murad.

Transcript for:Exploring the History of Ragtime Music

Transcript for:
Exploring the History of Ragtime Music