Sweet Sixteenths: A Ragtime Concert

William Albright | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD
• ASIN: B000QVZW10
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #316,442 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding, If It's What I Think It is, September 11, 2011

By 

Richard Wirtz "Dick" (Knoxville, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sweet Sixteenths: A Ragtime Concert (Audio CD)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars Defective Sound, February 10, 2012

By 

Travis Owen - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sweet Sixteenths: A Ragtime Concert (Audio CD)

I have long owned the LP, which contains the first ten tracks, and loved it so much I wore it out long before I learned to convert to .mp3. So, I purchased this CD. It arrived, and when I played it, I found that tracks 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 11 had one or more defects. They sound like the needle skipping on an LP, or like the "dropout" you sometimes get in streaming audio when a packet or two of silence is inserted. This is really annoying, especially since you come to anticipate it. To try to perfect my album, I downloaded tracks 3 and 11 from Amazon.com as .mp3 files. You guessed it; they have the same defects ! I used GoldWave to remove the mute sections as best I could, but it was not always possible because the length was not always the same in both left and right channels. Perhaps not all the disks are defective, I don't know. But if you're a fan of ragtime, you must have this album, and I hope your're handy with an audio editor. Caveat emptor !