December Features
Continued: The Ragtime Machine
DR: I think you have a sort of vaudeville mentality, that is, you plug in whatever is needed for the moment, whatever works.
TW: Yeah, whatever is needed for the show.
DR: Do you have any ideas yet to try?
TW: The last great idea I had was to have a symphony orchestra perform with a wrestling match.
DR: I've been in orchestras that turned into wrestling matches.
TW: Right. Wrestling matches are fake anyway and choreographed. You could get kids interested in this stuff if you could choreograph a wrestling match with Suppé, overtures and stuff like that. I think it would be a great event. Why not?
DR: Cutting contests with actual blood.
TW: And a symphony orchestra could get on the map doing something like that. I started asking around. Some symphony people told me the problem is it would get their regular sponsors so pissed off by being undignified that they would be afraid to do it.
DR: I think one problem is that the union has not yet set a "Symphony-Wrestling" scale. Although, I think they should; they've needed that for years.
TW: Yes, and get the World Wrestling Federation on it.
DR: When will your revised book be published?
TW: They want to get it out to coordinate with my teaching program at Jazz At Lincoln Center, next spring. The price will go up. The paperback from Da Capo was selling for 15 bucks, and it will go up to 45 for the new version of it. It will be on slicker paper, the illustrations will be redone, and it will be updated.
DR: Do you have anything on your wants list that my listeners [and readers] might be able to help you with?
TW: My most valuable piece of sheet music that I owned was "Felicity Rag" (Joplin), in mint condition that I got for 35 cents from Bill Russell. He had bought out John Stark, and when I went to New Orleans when I was 20 years old I bought these things. He would sell them for whatever the price was at the time they were published. I had a canary, Harry, that was flying free in my apartment. I started noticing snow falling down from the bookcase, and it turned out that Harry had eaten "Felicity Rag," or at least half of it.
DR: I hope the bird really enjoyed that.
TW: We had canary fricassee. He was a great singer. You'd play music, and he'd accompany you. He had good taste in music. I don't really collect music in the sense of going out and trying to get a lot of things, paying large amounts of money.
DR: Are you a completist in anything?
TW: No, not really. I have an odd collection of things. I have some 78s. I recently received some Eubie Blake stuff that came from Carl Seltzer. I have a few Robert Crumb drawings. I was trying to do an animated television series. I used to work in TV in Columbus, with the Warner Cube experiment in two-way television. They brought in all these people from New York, and I was the music director and hosting shows. Nickelodeon and MTV came out of that, and I still knew those people years later. So I thought that it would be great to take Crumb's characters and animate them. I was working with Leon Redbone at that time, and we would use his voice on some things.
DR: What would be the one artifact that you'd like to find from the ragtime era?
TW: Well, there are just those things that have slipped through our hands. For example, I got a call from a guy who had a massive collection of music in Columbus. He called and said he had some Scott Joplin orchestrations, and he gave me a stack of some rags. He said he had a garage full of stuff, and asked me if I'd ever heard of Cohan and Harris! It turns out he was the music director for them and had all of their music.
DR "Had" would be the operative term there. As you know, I collect orchestrations and have heard this verb form too often.
TW: He had contacted the Ohio historical society, and nobody would give him anything for it, so he had it all hauled away. This included manuscripts for all those shows!
DR: It seems you've worked with just about everybody in show business at one time or another.
TW: I don't know about everybody, but a lot of them. It's an odd assortment, and every once in a while I think about how I worked with this guy or that.
DR: And you've done stage shows in New York.
TW: Yes. I worked with Tom O'Horgan, who was the original director of Hair, on the Warren Harding thing I did.
DR: What is the next media project you're looking at?
TW: We're working on a PBS thing on ragtime right now. I need to get a little more funding, though we have some, and we have the interest. This might be a 90-minute project that's part live music and part documentary. We're going to shoot it at Howard University.
December 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
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