Customer Reviews

Sweet Sixteenths: A Ragtime Concert

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

Nuts to Amazon for not telling us what's on the various William Albright CDs they list one after another as "Sweet Sixteenths." Nuts.

It is now possible to get all of Scott Joplin's rags, in five star performances, without the other incidental stuff, if that is what you want. (By "other incidental stuff" I mean the miscellaneous waltzes, marches, etc. Scott Joplin wrote, which are very ordinary and pretty boring after awhile, if what you like is the rags.)

William Albright and William Bolcom are or were (I am not sure if Albright is still living) colleagues on the University of Michigan Music faculty and confederates in performing classic rags and writing new ones. William Albright has recorded all but four of Scott Joplin's rags on two disks. The two-disk set is available from the Musical Heritage Society (as "The Complete Rags of Scott Joplin"), which you have to join to get them, but joining the Musical Heritage Society is easy and free and it gives you access to a ton of music at very reasonable prices.

The four missing rags are the ones Joplin wrote jointly with one or another of his students. (I was thinking there were five of those; I may have lost a rag somewhere.) You can pick those up, expertly performed by William Bolcom, on a disk called "Sweet Sixteenths." There's a good chance that that disk is the one I am reviewing here. However: because Amazon does not give us enough information, it's hard to be sure. Assuming so: on this disk you also get William Albright's performances of rags by other composers, including terrific performances of two classic rags by the other two members of the original "big three," Joseph Lamb (Ragtime Nightingale) and James Scott (Peace and Plenty).

This disk has great performances by Albright of some other classic rags, including William H. Krell's Mississippi Rag (the first rag ever published, I believe) and Eubie Blake's Charleston Rag. Standing by itself, without the Musical Heritage Society disks, it still merits five stars.