The piano roll is an imperfect form of sound reproduction (though aren't they all?). It encodes pitch and duration, but dynamics were captured only intermittently; several flawed methods were devised to try to do so. Hearing a player piano is a bit like conversing with one of those automated robo-service machines that answer the phone at virtually every major corporation these days: the musical information makes syntactic sense, but some vital dimension of communication is missing. Still, the selections on this English import disc (and its volume-one cousin) are valuable ragtime rarities. Much of the music is by white composers. As with virtually every other major musical innovation accomplished by African Americans, ragtime was quickly picked up by white musicians. Their works were fundamentally derivative, but white ragtimers also often understood the music's appeal and created new works that were enjoyed and performed by whites and blacks alike. Hear the Grizzly Bear Rag, track 5, by George Botsford, composer of the phenomenally successful Black and White Rag: Botsford captures Scott Joplin's graceful way of creating textural contrasts between a rag's strains. The sole work by one of ragtime's black pioneers here, James Scott's Ragtime Oriole, stands above the rest of the music; its free, sweeping phrases transcend the piano roll's limitations and seem to point the way to the piano jazz that would replace ragtime before long. But equally popular around the year of this roll, 1911, would have been the Buzzer Rag of May Aufderheide, an Indianapolis musician who was ragtime's preeminent female composer -- and this work is not so easy to find on disc. The album also provides fascinating illustrations of ragtime's relationships with blues and jazz at its chronological tail end, and with the cakewalk and minstrel show "patrol" at its beginnings. Among the most interesting rolls here are several from the 1890s, showing how well established the rhythms that would be labeled ragtime were toward the end of that decade. A piano transcription of bandleader Arthur Pryor's A Coon Band Contest has rhythms that are ragtime in all but name, and this roll dates from 1895, well before Joplin inaugurated his ragtime career with the Original Rags of 1897. By 1899 the style had even made its way to Germany, where it was effectively if not especially elegantly copied by composer Abe Holzmann in Smokey Mokes. By the mid-1910s, despite Joplin's admonitions against doing so, pianists had begun to play basic ragtime sixteenth notes unevenly, and the freer rhythms of jazz were on the way. Especially interesting in this regard is the 1915 Rag of Harry Austin Tierney (the roll actually dates from 1913), who makes structural use of a contrast between uneven sixteenths in his first strain and the traditional even ones in the second. The result is a transitional rag that's very lively. In all, if you're looking for an offbeat disc as a gift for a ragtime enthusiast, you could hardly do better than this one. One note of caution: the "early piano jazz" billed on the cover is not present; this music all comes from the pre-jazz era. There is pre-ragtime, ragtime, and music from an odd stretch of the late 1910s where all kinds of rag-like syncopated pieces were labeled as blues, but there's nary a jazz solo in the bunch. ~ James Manheim, Rovi
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