Rags Are Riches

WILLIAM BOLCOM’S INTEREST IN RAGTIME began in 1967, when he learned of a vanished ragtime opera by Scott Joplin – a name he’d never heard – and discovered that Queens College associate Rudi Blesch had a vocal score of it. Blesch was co-author of They All Played Ragtime, the definitive book on the topic, and soon Bolcom was learning and performing the ragtime repertory. I think we can credit him with planting the seed that grew into the ragtime revival: he played some Joplin for Joshua Rifkin, who went on to record excellent interpretations of Joplin rags on Nonesuch LPs. The records sold well, and when film director George Roy Hill heard one of them, he decided to use Joplin’s music in the “The Sting” in 1973. The world became ragtime-suffused, to the point where I saw Benny Goodman mock “The Entertainer” at a late-‘70s Carnegie Hall concert.

Even as he was performing classic ragtime pieces, Bolcom began writing his own take on the genre, joining a number of fellow composers in the late ’60s to renew the literature of this engaging form. At first, he pieces were Joplin-like, but very soon he branched out into more Bolcom-esque works.

A somewhat heavy-handed recording of the then-complete Bolcom rags played by John Murphy came out in 1998; Spencer Myer released a single-disc collection of 16 Bolcom rags in 2017, and it’s a fine recording, but Marc-André Hamelin has just released a two-CD set that not only gives you everything Bolcom considers a rag but also presents them in a thoroughly idiomatic way. Hamelin sounds like he’s channeling Joplin by way of Bolcom, a testament to the skill both of composer and performer.

The 27 pieces included on these discs were written between 1968 and 2015, the majority of them before 1972. “Incineratorag,” one of the earliest, could pass for a 1902 piece except for some of the unusual (for that time) harmonies. In keeping with Joplin’s own admonitions, the sheet music for this one is headed, “For Heaven’s sake, not too fast!”

He noted that “Epitaph for Louis Chauvin,” another 1967 piece, “evokes the Gallic spirit of Chauvin’s only published rag ‘Heliotrope Bouquet.’” It’s a slow, charming rag, betraying its decade of origin by the use of such devices as a cycle of fifths in its middle section.

Soon enough, the rags turn quirkier. “Tabby Cat Walk,” no doubt a nod to Zez Confrey, puts catlike pauses towards its finish; “Knockout ‘A Rag’” features percussive effects thumped out on the piano.

“The Serpent’s Kiss” goes further in asking the pianist to add mouth-click percussion and whistling in the midst of a furious piece in which there are fewer syncopated moments – but those moments heighten the Prokofiev-like drama. And speaking of Prokofiev, there’s also the knockabout fun of “Brass Knuckles,” which Bolcom wrote in collaboration with William Albright, himself a composer of many fine rags. It aptly finishes the collection here.

“Rag-Tango” finds that a ragtime style can accommodate the syncopations of a tango rhythm, while “California Porcupine Rag” can’t decide how to end. Which is to say that the pieces are different enough each from each to delight with the variety, while remaining bound by the rhythmic elements that define rags and their jazzy successors.

Bolcom’s rag-writing fell away as he turned to other projects, picking up a National Medal of Arts, Pulitzer Prize, and Grammy Award along the way. But he wrote a rag titled “Contentment” in 2015, showng how syncopation can effectively underpin what’s essentially a lullaby. It’s as fine a piano piece as anything Debussy wrote. In fact, all of these rags are masterful, the kind of miniatures that rise above mere salon music.

It hardly bears repeating (although, dammit, I will) that Hamelin is the perfect pianist for this project. Technically speaking, he can play anything, so right there is a layer of transparency that allows interpretive choices to shine through. Interpretively, he once again seems to have born into the era he’s offering, in this case a late-19th century period refracted through the 1960s and given new and wonderful life in there here and now.

As Bolcom told Terry Waldo for Waldo’s book This Is Ragtime, “When I discovered ragtime, I discovered a kind of music that I could relate to in every way. I got knocked out by Scott Joplin. I think he’s one of the greatest guys of all time. He interested me because he was the first American who was able to take all of these various sources of music and synthesize them.” Bolcom is another of those synthesizers, and this recording should garner him and Hamelin more awards.