Ragtime Music

These recordings date from 1975 (the ragtimes) and 1976. Vox was the Naxos of the LP era. They made rare repertoire available at cheap prices, in interpretations that usually were no more than serviceable. One definitive advantage of the CD reissues is that the Vox LPs were often marred by poor, noisy pressings, hampering a full appreciation of the recordings.

In this survey of piano music in America between 1900 and 1945, some of the expected warhorses are there - Gershwin's Three Preludes and Copland's Piano Variations - but mostly we get rarely if ever recorded pieces, roughly arranged in chronological order. The very principle of this collection does entail some frustration, both for its unavoidable omissions (where are Ornstein, Nancarrow, Ruth Crawford?) and because it gives us only snippets from all these composers (some of them so rarely heard that it only serves to whet and frustrate one's appetite), and sometimes only excerpts, either from complete Sonatas (Ives, Barber) or from cycles (MacDowell's Woodland Sketches, Thomson's and Riegger's etudes, Griffes' Four Roman Sketches). But then it is invaluable for all the rarities it offers, so let us happily welcome what we get.

MacDowell's five excerpts from Woodland Sketches are rather uninteresting short tone poems in the style of Grieg, but Loeffler's language is more adventurous, conjuring the mysteriously sensuous harmonies of Scriabin and Debussy, with flights into Rachmaninoff.

Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, William Schuman are all much better known for their big symphonic scores or, in the case of Thomson, his operas and film scores (as well as his music criticism), making the inclusion of some of their piano music all the more welcome. Thomson's Third Piano Sonata from 1930 was written for Gertrude Stein whose interest for modern music was greater than her piano playing abilities, and offers the peculiarity of being written only for the white notes. It is mostly in the form of a simple, two-part invention and, despite the liner notes' claim, often sounds like "music for children" - say, the first steps of "Mikrokosmos". Maybe Thomson's "early and notoriously dissonant Sonata da Chiesa" (according to the notes) would have been a more interesting choice. The two etudes are excerpted from Thomson's 1943 Ten Etudes, each of which deals with some particular technical difficulties. The two chosen by Shields sound like (slightly out-of-tune) tango and ragtime all-right, and their small musical substance makes me think they must offer more fodder for playing than just for listening.

Like Thomson, Copland, Piston and Harris were pupils of Nadia Boulanger in Paris, but Barber, Schuman and Sessions were not. Still, their compositions share some common traits: they are usually stern, neo-classic in general outlook in that they are based on melodic and harmonic processes (often derived from Bach and the classical forms: 2-voice invention, chorale-like chord progressions, Passacaglia, Fugue) rather than the search of novel sound effects based on percussive attacks or clusters (as Cowell, Antheil and often Ives), and each movement often develops a certain specific compositional idea (sometimes overreaching their basic material to the point of satiation, as in the slow movement of Harris' Sonata or the introductory one from Sessions "From my Diary"). They never relinquish their ties to tonality, but their firm establishment is the modern times derives from their use of dissonance and bi- or polytonality. Even when they are not called as such, both Schuman's "Three Score Set" and Session's "From My Diary" mimic a Sonata construction (with slow introduction in the case of Sessions). Of all, it is Copland that establishes the most personal and immediately recognizable voice (to the point that the middle, choral part of Schuman's piece and some like passages of Harris strongly evoke the Brooklyn-born composer).

Other than Copland's Variations, my favorite pieces are those from the early modernists, Antheil, Cowell and Ives. Among the set's rarities, Wallingford Riegger's choice of 6 out of his 12 studies "New and Old" (1944) also offers an exceptional discovery. Riegger began his artistic course as a traditional Romantic composer but gradually evolved a much more personal language based upon dissonant chromatic counterpoint and eventually twelve-tone procedures, sounding very different from what Schoenberg and his school derived from the process (see Riegger: Symphony No3, Romanza, Dance Rhythms, Music for Orchestra, Concerto for Piano and Woodwind Quintet, Music for Brass Choir, Movement for Two Trumpets Trombone and Piano, Nonet for Brass and Wallingford Riegger: Variations / Sym No.4 for a good presentation of his orchestral work). As implied by their titles (further developed in the composer's explanations that introduce them in the score), the etudes illustrate certain compositional processes, but they are much more than mere didactic and cold exercises, offering instead dazzling virtuosity and mesmerizing sonic imagination, making it all the more frustrating that Shields didn't record the complete set.

The survey is completed by a fine program of 13 ragtimes - indeed one of the most vernacular inventions of American music - lasting 40 minutes in all, some of them highly elaborate and virtuosic, as Robert Hampton's "Cataract Rag", Lucky Roberts' "Pork and Beans" and Eubie Blake's "Troublesome Ivories".

Where I have scores and/or comparative versions to allow for an informed opinion, Shields is mostly excellent to outstanding, to make one wonder why he didn't have more of a career (this is his only recording I am aware of). He's got the required virtuosity, snap, muscularity and sometimes frenzy (Ives' two Studies, Antheil's Sonata, Cowell's "Invention" and "Advertisement"), and a fine sense of color and atmosphere (Griffes, Cowell's "Exultation"). Only in Cowell's "Aeolian harp" do I find him, compared to the composer's own recording (Henry Cowell plays his own Piano Music), square in tempo ("Tempo Rubato" is the tempo indication) and greyer in his colors and dynamics.

But part of his program Shield plays on an inferior piano which can't sustain a chord, and the sound of the pedal mechanism can be heard in some like a short maracas rattle. In some of the pieces Shield's humming can be heard, not outlandishly out-of-tune like Glenn Gould's, but strangely raspy, as if produced with the help of a kazoo.

Composer Lejaren Hiller and Shields himself for the ragtimes contribute remarkably interesting, informed and informative liner notes.

Zez Confrey's music is alternately full of joy and passion. The realizations of his piano rolls here are wholly enjoyable. The only way you can detect that the recording was based on a mechanical device is in the sameness of the volume level on some of the piano roll selections. Some of the piano rolls lack dynamics and other expression markings, which would have been added by the operator of the player piano. These markings have been tastefully supplied by Artis Wodehouse through a computer program. The Ampico company piano rolls have these markings, and have been transferred to the computer program with engaging directness. A number of lesser known, more esoteric works of Confrey have been played for this recording by Artis Wodehouse herself, and they are thoroughly enjoyable and refreshing, if without the bravura of Confrey's piano rolls. If you have never heard this music before, it summons up its era, the 1920's, with great elan. This disc transports you to another time and another aesthetic in a memorable way.

If you already know and enjoy Zez Confrey's music, this disc belongs in your collection. If Confrey is unknown to you, this disc still belongs in your collection, unless of course you find joyful, exuberant piano music to be repugnant.

For those new to Confrey, here's a brief description:

Edward Elzear Confrey (known to all as Zez) was a self-described composer of novelty piano music, his way of trying to describe music that was at once influenced by ragtime, early jazz, popular songs, and classical composers, particularly Debussy and MacDowell. His music rarely if ever aspires to emotional profundity, but its sheer joy, bounce, and tunefulness make it hard to put down once you've started, whether as listener or pianist. As an amateur pianist, I've been playing Zez Confrey's music for 20 years. The reactions I have gotten from people over the years have been consistently the same; "Wow! Who wrote that?", and "Are there recordings of this music I can buy?". Now, this disc gives me an easy answer to the second question.

This disc is Artis Wodehouse's fourth disc devoted to her amazing humanized piano rolls. The first two covered a good cross-section of George Gershwin's piano rolls, while a third was a collection of piano rolls by Jelly Roll Morton. This is easily her finest work since the first "Gershwin plays Gershwin" disc in 1993.

Zez Confrey, like his contemporaries George Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton, left behind a well-rounded collection of acoustic gramophone recordings as well as paper piano rolls. The least sophisticated of these paper rolls merely captured the notes that the pianist played and nothing more. Once the roll was published and sold, it was the job of the consumer, operating his or her own reproducing piano, to mechanically add pedaling, rubato, and dynamics as he or she saw fit. However, the most sophisticated reproducing rolls captured not only the notes but the pedaling, rubato, and dynamics used by the pianist, often with uncanny accuracy. All paper rolls allowed the pianist the option of post-production editing, e.g., removing wrong notes, and in popular music such as this, adding dazzling "third hand" counterpoint effects that made the end result unplayable by a human pianist. Confrey was one the best at this, and he uses this technique liberally throughout the rolls on this disc. (For those of you familiar with Confrey's "Kitten on the Keys" or "Dizzy Fingers" in their standard published versions, you're in for a treat once you hear Confrey's souped up three-handed versions presented here.) Still, even the best of these paper rolls played back on the best reproducing pianos could never be mistaken by an astute listener for a human being (two-handed or otherwise). There was always a discernible gap between playing produced in the human realm and that of the mechanical realm, that is until relatively recently. The explosion of digital technology has allowed such things as computerized reproducing pianos like the Yamaha Disklavier to become a readily available reality. Recordings made and played back on such pianos are virtually indistinguishable from live human performances. It wasn't long before people like Artis Wodehouse starting exploring ways to apply this technology to the old paper rolls, finally enabling listeners to experience what it might have been like to hear pianists like Gershwin, Morton, and Confrey recorded in the flesh, and in modern sound. By taking the information encoded on these old paper rolls and feeding it into a Yamaha Disklavier system, she has been able narrow the gap between human playing and mechanical playing to the point of near nonexistence. Through careful study of Confrey's actual playing from acoustic recordings, Wodehouse has softened the mechanical edges, painstakingly adding those qualities that distinguished Confrey's playing in the flesh, effectively making each roll indistinguishable from an actual human performance.

On the first Gershwin disc from 1993, several of the rolls she chose had been previously recorded in their original paper roll form. Having heard these original paper roll recordings, listening to Artis Wodehouse's humanized versions of these same rolls was like seeing an old film before and then after restoration. In short, it was a revelation.

This new Zez Confrey disc easily lives up to these high standards Wodehouse set for herself, indeed this disc may even set the bar higher. This time around, not only is Wodehouse working from two different types of paper rolls, she is actually playing some of the pieces herself, works that Confrey did not record, but that deserve a place on any disc of Confrey's music. The joyful bounce and rhythmic snap of her playing so perfectly matches Confrey's own playing that it becomes impossible to tell which tracks are hers and which are Confrey's. The result is an amazingly seamless and unified blend of musicianship, scholarship, technological know-how, with an astute understanding of the individual elements that made Confrey's playing unique. Whether as pianist or digital editor, with this CD, Wodehouse has done more for Confrey's music than has anyone before her. The results are well worth hearing.

I've heard Artis Wodehouse play in other venues and she is an artist of the most amazing versatility and profound knowledge, not to mention astounding energy. This CD is exciting to listen to, friends play in their workplaces to add zip to life there. It will bring you tremendous enjoyment.

In some ways, Artis Wodehouse's Disklavier realization of Zez Confrey's lighter-than-air pianistic joyrides is an even more impressive accomplishment than her previous restorations of Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton piano rolls. Confrey's novelty style seems the truest musical embodiment of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is fascinating to hear the spirit of the 20s come to life in such a nerve titillating way. Especially remarkable are the selections hand played by Ms. Wodehouse into the Disklavier. Though they are designated on the jacket liner notes, by ear it is impossible to tell the difference-- a tribute to the complete success and seamless integrity of her stylistic resurrection.

I initially heard one cut "Sacred Ground" on a local NPR station at the end of a long day on the road. Even after 400+ miles "Sacred Ground" had me tapping my steering wheel and wanting to play the cut multiple times to pin down the words.

The album carries on the joys of "Sacred Ground" - simple and direct lyrics, a raw voice with great musicality, acoustical bass and drums supporting an electric guitar, traditional blues with syncopation,... What Mooney does best is carry on a blues tradition while innovating within its constraints.

My only complaint is the similarity between several of the cuts - as creative an artist as John Mooney could surely modify his sound sufficently to give a distinctive touch to each song.

Mooney's voice is unforgettable. If you've heard him once, you'll always recognize him no matter what he's playing. And play he does!!! "Sacred Ground" and "Broken Mold" are raucus toe-tappers. Don't confuse his style on "Sideways in Paradise" (with Thackery) with this album. This one's much more raw and aggresive. Great Job!!!

First a declaration of bias - I am a big John Mooney fan - all the way back to when I first heard his "Late Last Night" album in the 80's.

Of all his albums this remains my favorite (others are "Dealing with the Devil", and of course the one that started it all "Late Last Night")

This first came out on the House of Blues label (that edition may have become something of a collectible) - fortunately it is still available albeit sparsely on the (German) Ruf label.

Although Mooney has a had a long been influenced by New Orleans sound, this is the first album where I think he's managed the full integration/amalgamation between his original major Son House Delta Blues influence and New Orleans.

The sound on this album is full - yet mostly it's just him and a drummer (some tracks add bass and/or congas) - the minimal additional instrumentation enhances the overall sound - yet manages to put focus on the vocal and guitar playing. "Broken Mold" has a great New Orleans second-line rhythm that really makes the song over his live solo performances - great as those are.

The strength of this album is the selection of songs, there's not a weak one among them, and their sequencing - where each song in turn seems just right, and makes the listening an exhilerating pleasure from start to finish.

A very worthwhile album - if you like John Mooney - you should have this album -
and at some of the prices on Amazon MarketPlace there is almost no excuse......

I have been listening to and collecting blues recordings since c. 1970 and I believe that this album is without question one of a handful of truly GREAT blues albums recorded in the modern era. Mooney's distinctive style -- a blend of intense, sharp-edged Delta blues with the syncopated second-line rhythms of New Orleans -- is at its apex on this release. And the minimalist backing (just bass & drums on most cuts) lets Mooney's guitar and vocals exert their powerful spell on you. The songs cut to the bone. This is one of those albums of which it can truly be said, "If you don't like it, then buddy you just don't like blues."

John Mooney has been recording, innovating and evolving his unique style of acoustic and electric blues for 20 years. Never satisfied with simple imatation, he always creates. This album is no exception.

John has developed and mastered an electric delta rooted guitar style then blended it with New Orleans syncopated rhythms to create a brew that is simultaneously soulfull and energizing.

There is little innovation in blues today that is keeping its heart and soul. John Mooney is an exception. He penned 9 of the 10 songs on this record an not one of them is a mere aping of some one else's style - yet they convey all of the human spirit and emotion of the masters before him.

John is an artist with both talent and creativity!