Ragtime Music

Joplin only 'recorded' on paper piano rolls which should explain the quality of this recording.

There seems to be a mixup on AMAZON's webpage for this Scott Joplin CD. The song samples offered for WMP are not Joplin at all, but a much later jazz band.

In spite of this and the first review here, I purchased the disc. I'm quite familiar with the 1970-era Nonesuch issue of Joplin piano rolls, and thoroughly enjoy listening to him play, even if it's piano once-removed through this turn-of-the-century mechanical process.

One thing is clear-- Scott Joplin was a virtuoso, and nothing, not poor sound quality or slightly wrong speed playbacks of piano rolls, can obscure this fact.

I bought this CD...thinking that for [the price], I couldn't go wrong. Well, I think I did. I like the music itself a great deal; however, I still cannot recommend this CD. Why? At least two reasons: 1) The music is good, but it sounds so fuzzy on this CD that it's hard to listen to. It sounds like someone mastered it directly off of an original LP without bothering to clean up all the pops and hisses and other noise. I believe in atmosphere, but this is a bit much. I'd have liked it cleaned up a little bit, at least. 2) The (total lack of) care with which this CD was mastered shows itself in the fact that the track begin/end points in the disc's catalog do not match the actual song begin/end points, so switching tracks often puts you in the MIDDLE of a song rather than at the beginning. If you really want to hear the music, and this is the only CD available, then go for it. But it would be worth it to spend more and get a significantly higher quality recording if available.