August Features
Sedalia's Joplin Festival Maintains Top Quality Ragtime Reputation
Text and Photos by Murray Bishoff
This year's Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri, offered a free ranging salute to ragtime and popular American music in general from the first 25 years of the 20th century, a trend that artistic director Sue Keller has plotted for several years. The five-day event, held June 4-8, offered indoor and outdoor concerts, paid and free, and it again featured about 80 different performers.
For the first day, concerts were held at State Fair Community College, at the Little Theatre, in a continuous stream of performers. Thursday through Saturday, afternoon and evening paid concerts were held in the Liberty Center theater off the square in downtown Sedalia. Free concerts were held throughout the day in six locations around the downtown area.
The quality of this year's concerts remained very high. On several occasions, there were recollections of veteran performer John Arpin, a ragtime icon who died last year.
The Thursday afternoon Cradle of Ragtime concert again focused on Missouri and Mississippi Valley composers, who provided much of ragtime's core. John Petley played Brun Campbell's "Barbershop Rag," James Scott's 1909 "Grace and Beauty," and Robert Hampton's 1915 "Agitation Rag."
The guitar duo, the Royal Guitars, with Torsten Ratzkowski from Germany and Jan Thomsen from Denmark, offered an acoustic chamber music feel for their versions of Joplin's 1907 "Heliotrope Bouquet," J.B. Lamb's lively "Glad Rag," and the 1918 hit "Indianola" by S.R. Henry and D. Onivas. Sixteen-year-old Adam Swanson, winner of the 2008 Old Time Piano Competition in Peoria, Ill., offered mature interpretations of Joseph Lamb's 1919 "Bohemia," W.C. Handy's 1914 "St. Louis Blues," adding original boogie woogie for a full blown finale, and the 1926 "Bluin' the Black Keys" by dance band pianist Arthur Schutt.
The Ragtime Rebels, a seven-member percussion ensemble from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, played two marimbas and an alto xylophone, plus a drum set. Their set included Joplin's "The Favorite," Billy Joel's "Root Beer Rag," Felix Arndt's "Nola," Hamilton Green's Oriental fox trot "Rajah," and the bravura "Stubernic" by North Texas University professor Mark Ford.
The Thursday evening concert was centered around a presentation of 51 pages from the vocal score to Joplin's opera Treemonisha, broken down to eight excerpts, including the overture, prelude to Act Three, the finale, and memorable vocal numbers, bringing out all the major musical motifs. Despite one rehearsal and unexpected substitutions, the performance came off amazingly well. Violinist David Reffkin largely held the performance together as a musically commanding concertmaster. Keller conducted from one of the pianos, leading the other players, including Anne Barnhart on flute, Jeff Barnhart on another piano, Steve Standiford on tuba, Danny Coots on drums, and a vocal ensemble of about a dozen. The orchestration was written to match the forces available.
The rest of the concert explored very different territory. Terry Waldo offered commentary on Republicans and Democrats in a new verse to "Everything Is All Right With Me," and dedicated "Wrong Side" to the current administration in Washington, D.C. He also offered a slow-then-snappy version of "The Charleston" by stride piano father James P. Johnson, from the 1923 Broadway show Runnin' Wild.
Neville Dickie went further into stride territory with Johnson's "Old Fashioned Love" and "If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight," along with a stride treatment to Jan Schwartz's 1908 "Whitewash Man." He added the first published boogie woogie, "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie" by Pine Top Smith from 1928, played as if it had been written in the 1940s' boogie woogie heyday.
August 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
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