But the music of all of them lives.īaltimore's Eubie Blake carried on the great tradition. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith and Thomas "Fats" Waller. Johnson, Artie Matthews, Percy Wenrich, Clarence Woods, Charles Roberts, James P. Joplin-Marshall, for instance, did "Swipsey Cake Walk" and Joplin-Hayden did "Sunflower Slow Drag" and "Something Doing." Bolcom in a recent year wrote "Brass Knuckels" with William Albright.įrom "Ragtime Nightmare" to "Don't Jazz me Rag-I'm Music," ragtime was peopled by many other heroes: Tom Turpin, Charles Hunter, Charles H. Though it was a joint effort, writing a ragtime piece with someone else was and is not uncommon. "The Heliotrope Bouquet" is one of the standards of classic ragtime repertory, a lovely "slow drag two step" with the composers' warning, "Do not play this piece fast. It's an interesting distinction from Joplin's familiar title of "King of Ragtime." The two other remaining Chauvin works, also collaborative, were "The Moon is Shining in the Skies" (1903), with fellow ex-vaudevillian Sam Patterson, and "Babe, It's too Long Off" (1906), "probably scored by Patterson," according to the New Grove Dictionary of American Music.Ĭhauvin goes unmentioned in many standard reference works but gets some space in the New Grove where his genius as "King of the Ragtime Players" is noted. Bolcom tried somewhat successfully to recapture Chauvin's "gentle French-Creole quality" with his modern tune "Graceful Ghost." Heliotrope is a plant whose purple flower turns to the sun.Ĭhauvin played the first two languid parts of the piece, Joplin wrote them down and composed the last two himself "as an affectionate postscript to Chauvin's sensuous two themes," Bolcom noted in jacket notes in a 1971 Nonesuch Record borrowing the rag's title. He left only three printed pieces, one of them the famous "Heliotrope Bouquet" (1907) which he wrote with Joplin, the subject of Overmyer's play about making art. Joplin wrote his music down and left dozens of ragtime works and an opera "Treemonisha," revived in the 1970's, although other pieces such as the early opera "A Guest of Honor" are gone.īut Chauvin could not read or write music and though he played and composed almost daily late in his brief life, his great creativity disappeared with the wind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |