POO: Scott Joplin

All this talk of Chopin and Satie with excursions into Scriabin got me wondering about my favorite American composer for solo piano. Looks like he's never had an ILM thread, either.

Go.

Solace

It comes down to Maple Leaf vs. Solace for me. If I want the emotional sweep of a four-part suite, I go for Solace. If I want the archetypal rag, I go with The Maple Leaf.

Today, I need to be pepped up, so... The Maple Leaf it is.

although sometimes 'We will trust you as our leader' from Treemonisha is my favorite thing he ever wrote

Treemonisha is so wonderful. Apart from the hits ('Aunt Dinah', 'A Real Slow Drag') it's not the kind of thing I play every day but when I do I'm all the way there with it. Kind of amazing there hasn't been another recording since the Gunter Schuller one, which is great but hardly seems like it should be the last word & c'mon it's been 35 years

convince kanoko!

New recording

Haven't listened yet, just reading the packaging first

http://www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi?rm=view&album_id=90185

god it's SO GOOD. it's like I've never heard some of these songs before, and I have definitely heard them before

Rick Benjamin's liners address what he was trying to do with this 'historically accurate' version, the idea that the original Houston / Schuller orchestrations went too far in the direction of European grand opera at the expense of US performance idioms i.e. how Joplin would have been rehearsing his players. Playing Joplin with a Verdi-scale orchestra definitely runs the risk of clouding some of the rhythms and making some of the subtler things come off as too spare -- same sort of criticisms Satie ran into with his orchestral arrangements, where things that seem devastating on piano just seem simple when blown up and played like full-throttle Mozart. As a chamber orchestra the musicians can just dial in to each other and the music has a level of nuance and total elegance that gets completely lost on the Schuller

That being said, on the big act-ending numbers like 'Aunt Dinah' and 'Slow Drag', it's hard for me not to miss the completely over the top versions on the original recording though perhaps I'm just used to those through having hit those tracks harder in iTunes than the other ones. There's just something to be said for a chorus of 40-60 people in hall-sized reverb for the closing number.

The pictures in the 108 page book that comes with this are incredible, the picture of the Black Patti Troubadours from 1897-98 -- you wonder about every single person in that photograph.

Anyway, what a shock to just see this staring at me from a record bin, what are the web sites I need to be hanging out on that are cool enough to tell me about big news like this?

One more irreplacable thing about the original recording: Carmen Balthrop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukgWU6JCZkg

/irreplaceable

A lot of interesting productions / performances of Treemonisha stuff on YouTube

it's kinda weird that we have so little to say about him around here - such a titan both of American music and of music in general, really just an unbelievable creative mind. But even before be-bop I think there was a weird tendency to sell ragtime short - and afterwards, the world of jazz is blown open so wide that a lot of the early stuff sort of tucks itself into specialist corners. when I was a kid I would listen to Scott Joplin records with wonder, it was like listening to the mind of God or something - I saw Max Morath do Joplin when I was a kid and it was really something

Seeing Morath must have been great. Benjamin goes into his choice to refrain from using banjo in his new Treemonisha as an instrument that had grown uncomfortable associations for black performers in the 10's, and I instantly thought of those Morath records (which I love)

I think he's just between revivals. The early 70's discovery went so deep that it's easy to take him for granted as a background force, leaving the in-depth discussion to the same fanatics who kept this stuff alive from the 20's to the 70's. If you were a kid in the 70's, this music's just in your bloodstream, it was inescapable, so I think another wave of true appreciation is coming

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203833104577070683505219416.html

"'Treemonisha,'" says Mr. Benjamin, "is truly a rare artifact of a vanished culture: an opera about African-Americans of the Reconstruction era—created by a black man who actually lived through it."

Putting it straight-up like this is amazing, I've been listening to this for years without really ever thinking of it in those terms. It does raise the expectations for it, almost to the stratosphere, it makes it so difficult to hear it on its own terms. But it's seriously worth the work, for every track with awkward sentimental lyrics like 'Wrong Is Never Right' that ping my cliche-meter off the map, there are moments when I realize that this is an opera written in the 1910's with no white characters whatsoever and that it's kind of an entirely new set of rules.

Been listening to both versions a lot this weekend. My first impression is basically standing; overall the new arrangement really does feel a lot stronger & unified, and the vocalists are no slouches; there's something in the booklet about how they keep more of Joplin's notated dialect this time, something that was possibly too touchy for 1970. But the Deutsche Grammofon engineering on the original recording is a factor too; mixing & blending a chorus that huge on top of an orchestra without it sounding like a room recording is no easy trick, and when it gets to 'We Will Trust You' & 'A Real Slow Drag'... the new version is good, but the DG versions of those are ecstatic

so... you need both

Treemonisha is so wonderful.

OTM! Excited that there's a new recording. Thanks.

NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH SCOTT JOPLIN LOVE ON ILM.

I am so obsessed with "Maple Leaf Rag" right now that I am seriously considering buying a piano just so I can learn how to play it because it is an awesome awesome song. ILM, please talk me out of this ridiculous bee in my bonnet.

the Treemonisha liner notes on New World should be read by absolutely everybody

just everybody

hmmm gotta check this out!
there is some 70s movie called SCOTT JOPLIN on Netflix streaming right now, anyone watched it? Worth it?

bill dee williams as scott joplin

So many of Joplin's compositions were lost before interest in his work was revived. Before Treemonisha, he had another opera called A Guest Of Honor which got good reviews at the time but we'll never hear it.

Anyway, 'Solace', over 'Heliotrope Bouquet'

top 10 SJ:

Solace
Pineapple Rag
Maple Leaf Rag
Sunflower Slow Drag (w/ Scott Hayden)
Swipesy Cakewalk (w/ Arthur Marshall)
Rose Leaf Rag
Weeping Willow Rag
Gladiolus Rag
Heliotrope Bouquet (w/ L Chauvin)
Elite Syncopations

the Treemonisha liner notes on New World should be read by absolutely everybody

just everybody

― combination hair (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, January 13, 2014

all those sections of Treemonisha I once took for being just a little bit too sentimental are now the most moving

This thread is sleeping on "The Easy Winners"

My daughter has been playing some of these, in particular “Elite Syncopations.” Maybe some of you will see a video of it soon.

Magnetic Rag

if I'm picking only one, then Solace

Forever!