Assorted Thoughts On Assorted Music

I haven't kept on up on this music blog ting as much as I would have liked yet. I blame the hypnotic glare of middle-class poverty. If you don't know what middle-class poverty is, then you probably can't have it explained to you.

Most people who know me know of my love for a handful of artists/idioms that most frequently produce irritation to the listener or derisive comments from the observer of my enthusiasm for them. Notably among these musical pariahs are Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Barbershop Quartet, and the piano rags of Scott Joplin.

I'll not tackle barbershop quartet because it's arguably the least defensible of the three, or the least fun to defend, anyway. But I WILL take on the other two. Let me start with Joplin.

I first became aware of the existence of ragtime piano through my grandparents. My grandmother, Gladys Howard Abbe (the daughter of working class English immigrants), was an accomplished musician, specifically a soprano and a pianist. As a pianist, her passion was the "stride" piano style famously associated with Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and to a certain extent, Art Tatum, the Van Halen of early 20th-century jazz pianists. She could play like Jesus threw mystery fish to peckish Canaanites.- it was miraculous-sounding, yet she didn't seem to be putting even the slightest effort into it at all. She was a dour, often depressed, sometime tyrannical English woman (well, English-American), but when she played, all of that melted away and it was pure joy that eminated from her face. She was progidal, really. She had perfect pitch (I'm close, but can't quite sing an A# reliably without a relative pitch), amazing technique, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of early standards, novelty tunes, and a great many classical piece.

Anyway, getting to it, the piano in my grandparents' house was a player piano, an old one with a lot of great reels piled up all around it. Naturally, there were a bunch of Joplin rags included in those reels, since reels and sheet music were the primary modes of hearing new Joplin compositions in his day. I can remember setting the reels in and watching the ghostly hands bang out those stunning syncopations in awe. I couldn't really imagine how people could play that stuff. I loved the music- it was, to me, funny, frantic, virtuoustic, and underneath it all, incredibly sad. I always thought ragtime music was sad more than anything else. Whenever I made up movies in my head as a little kid, the end always came with the death of the protagonist set to "Paragon Rag" or "Maple Leaf Rag" or, when I got older and learned more of Joplin's pieces "Solace: A Mexican Serenade".

That combination of humor and solitude that is captured so well in Joplin's work is one which I seem to find in a lot of my favorite music in general. Another piano composer, Frederic Chopin, filled his music with much of the same sentiment, in fact, I've always considered the waltzes and mazurkas of Chopin to be kissing cousins to Joplin's rags. There's even a theoretical basis for this, since both commonly use passing chromatic notes in their melodies and often have strikingly similiar progressions. Don't even get me started about the Smiths. Or the Misfits, for that matter.

Most people regard Scott Joplin as novelty music. This I don't understand. Sure, it's of its time, but why is that if not for a laundry list of films and television shows depicted those whimsically to the sound of "The Entertainer"? And why isn't such whimsy associated with a "serious" composer like Chopin, or Mozart, for that reason, who is guilty of similiar harmonic flights of fancy? And furthermore, why is it that at the same time that Joplin is not taken seriously, he is considered one of the progenators of jazz? I mean who takes music more seriously, or overly serious, than jazz people? I can tell you from personal experience that no one does.

I don't know. I've gone on too long about him. All I know is that Joplin's rags are some of the only pieces of music in any idiom that can totally transform my emotional state, no matter what mood I am in to start. It takes me away like very little else does, not even my precious fucking indie pop, kids. So give him a chance, is all.

Next entry: Jedediah takes on Frankie Valli and the Wall of Resistance, or On The Important Italian-American Contribution to Pop Music.