GUEST REVIEW: RAGTIME

Bruce Kogan is back with his guest review to end our month of Ragtime stories. This review is a look at the 1981 movie version of Ragtime. It's a great movie with a great review from Bruce...

Back in the day when Hollywood was grinding out B westerns it wasn't unusual at all to see famous folks of the west in stories that had absolutely nothing to do with their own lives or to see many famous people interacting when they never even met in real life.

Ragtime revives some of that dubious tradition in filming E.L. Doctorow's novel about the Teddy Roosevelt years of the first decade of the last century. Teddy figures into this briefly as does his Vice President Charles Fairbanks. Booker T. Washington is here too, as are the principals of the Stanford White murder, and New York City Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo.

It's quite a blend because Roosevelt and Fairbanks ran for re-election in 1904 as Fairbanks is shown delivering a campaign speech. He wasn't even Vice President then, just a Senator from Indiana. Fairbanks was running for Vice President because Roosevelt had no Vice President in his first term. He succeeded to the presidency when Willima McKinley was assassinated.

The Stanford White murder took place in 1906 and was then called the crime of the century. Many such murders right up to O.J. Simpson were given that dubious distinction. And Rhinelander Waldo was not NYPD Police Commissioner until 1910 and he was much younger than James Cagney. 

Still and all E.L. Doctorow's book is made into a fine film which got a whole bunch of Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director for Milos Forman and Supporting player nominations for Howard Rollins, Jr. and Elizabeth McGovern.

The main story is about Coalhouse Walker, Jr. a black ragtime pianist and his Sarah. She has his baby and they'd like to get married. But a whole lot of things, some of them peripherally connected to the true events and people previously mentioned that lead him and a gang to take possession of the Morgan Library and threaten to blow it up.

Howard Rollins was a real tragedy. This was a great start to a short, but brilliant career that included his long running role as Virgil Tibbs in the TV series In the Heat of the Night and the film A Soldier's Story. He died way too young from AIDS contracted from a lot of intravenous drug use.

Elizabeth McGovern is the famous Evelyn Nisbet, the girl on the red velvet swing which was the title of another film that dealt with the Stanford White murder. McGovern's performance is probably closer to the real Evelyn than Joan Collins was in that earlier film. She's basically a goldigger who juggled two men, her husband Harry K. Thaw and her upscale lover, society architect Stanford White. Her circus act led to White's death, Thaw's commitment to an insane asylum and a vaudeville career for her.

Ragtime was eagerly awaited because of the anticipated return of James Cagney to the screen after being off for 19 years. Cagney is clearly aged, but he gets through the role because unlike that television film Terrible Joe Moran, he's not the center of the film, though he's first billed. Note that he's sitting down during most of his performance and when he has to stand the camera is a discreet distance. It's nothing like the bouncing Cagney of old, but light years better than Terrible Joe Moran.

This was also the final joint appearance as it turned for the team that invented the buddy film, James Cagney and Pat O'Brien even though they have no scenes together. O'Brien is Harry K. Thaw's attorney and Mrs. O'Brien plays Thaw's mother under her maiden name of Eloise Taylor. She was an actress before she married Pat, but gave up her career to raise their four children.

Author Norman Mailer plays Stanford White, fulltime architect and hedonist and Robert Joy plays the demented millionaire Harry K. Thaw and both fit the parts perfectly. Maybe one day we will have a definitive film version just concentrating on the murder and it's aftermath for the three principals.

Milos Forman gave us a remarkable evocation of an exciting time in American history. It seemed that America had limitless possibilities then. I doubt they'll be saying that about the first decade of this century...

BRUCE RATING: 9 OUT OF 10

MY REVIEW: 10 OUT OF 10

SCOTT JOPLIN'S RAGTIME

Here is a great article I found online on the music of Scott Joplin. He is often considered the "father of Ragtime"...

Scott Joplin's ragtime gets its dues finally. 1973's The Sting took it global, but there's more to ragtime music than that film's Keystone Kops crazy-chase soundtrack One album was all it took to herald a revival. In 1970, the year of Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water and The Beatles' Let It Be, a record of arcane late 19th-century American piano music, released on a label that was otherwise building its reputation as a chronicler of the hardcore American avant-garde, began to sell in implausible quantities. Audiences ordinarily enamoured of piano miniatures by Chopin, Brahms and Liszt were suddenly taking pleasure in the compositions of Scott Joplin, the Texas-born "King of Ragtime" whose über-catchy 1899 Maple Leaf Rag brought him immediate popularity, but who died in 1917 with two typically embarrassing composerly problems hanging over him: syphilis and a terminally unproduced opera, Treemonisha, which would only be recognised as a masterwork long after his death.

Joshua Rifkin, an up-and-coming pianist in 1970, had ragtime brought to his attention by the composer William Bolcom and the evangelising jazz writer Rudi Blesh. Rifkin persuaded the New York-based Nonesuch label to act on his hunch that the trickster melodies and brain-worm syncopations characteristic of ragtime pieces – decked out with such whimsical titles as The Entertainer, Heliotrope Bouquet and Swipesy – would appeal directly to the hearts and minds of classical piano buffs. But neither pianist nor record label could have foreseen the itchy enthusiasm for this once popular but long-since forgotten music that would mushroom across the United States and beyond.

In terms of time and historical distance, if not exactly musical content, an equivalent discovery today would see the mainstream media suddenly fixate on bebop; The One Show's Gyles Brandreth recalled from catching up with authentic jam-making in Dorset to discuss the intricacies of period Charlie Parker records. That's the force with which ragtime percolated deep inside American culture. Woody Allen gave his 1973 film Sleeper a ragtime soundtrack. EL Doctorow called his latest novel Ragtime. Film director George Roy Hall underscored his wisecracking card-hustler movie The Sting with Joplin rags.

Pre-Spotify – and pre-Simon Cowell – wildcard albums had leeway to punch above their market weight; Scott Joplin could and did chart alongside The Beatles. But if Rifkin brought ragtime to hundreds of thousands of people, the Oscar-wining The Sting catapulted the music into the mainstream. With visionary prescience in 1915, Joplin proclaimed "50 years after I'm dead my music will be appreciated." He was only out by a few years, but ragtime's complete identification in the popular imagination with The Sting became difficult. Here was ragtime dressed in fancy instrumentations, dolled up to the orchestral nines by film composer Marvin Hamlisch; rags no longer smiling innocently, but lent an insincere Hollywood grin.

Joplin's mantra would never waver: appreciation of his sleights-of-hand – notes never quite falling into the patterns you expect – relied on savouring each moment. By rushing his tempos, he said in his School of Ragtime primer, "very often good players lose the effect entirely." But the high-energy hokum of The Sting recast ragtime as Keystone Kops crazy-chase music by default, an unhappy paradox given that George Roy Hall was introduced to rags via Rifkin's recordings – interpretations rooted in his insistence on treating Joplin with the same faithful respect afforded to a Chopin Mazurka or a Brahms Waltz.

"Rag" as in "tease", so ragtime is literally "tease time". Hearing Joplin's signature composition "The Entertainer" today is like the warm glow of a comedian's dependable catchphrase; it's always nice to hear it nice. Other Joplin compositions, though, reveal their tease only gradually. My own fascination with Heliotrope Bouquet has at times bordered on obsession. My musician's brain that can fully rationalise Joplin's harmonic moving parts, but that nuts-and-bolts analysis actually tells you little about its true emotional sting. Balanced flawlessly in an emotional fault line between forlorn melancholy and aching wistfulness, this piece wears smiles you only see once they have already begun to fade. This is Peggy Lee's tart Is That All There Is? decades before the event. Or music that mirrors Schubert's trademark harmonic polysemousness – and all neatly contained within a four-minute structure.

The letter of a Joplin score must be obeyed. Rifkin's intuition has long since been vindicated, although questions remain about where ragtime stands historically in relation to jazz. The scholar Terry Waldoargued, in his superb 1976 book This Is Ragtime, that the music presented a sonic metaphor for the day-to-day experience of early 20th-century Black America, the melodic liberation of the right-hand endeavouring to undermine the left-hand's slavish regularity. And although jazz musicians of a certain mindset would eagerly adapt ragtime to their own improvisational ends – Sidney Bechet's 1932 Maple Leaf Rag is a true jazz masterpiece – my own hunch is that Joplin's music was anyway inherently improvisational.

Rags had the same identikit structure. Looped 16-bar phrases always gravitated back towards the home key, but merry-legged melodic lines took sharp, unforeseen corners, drunk on their own invention; Joplin was improvising on the page. But modern jazzmen were surely too darn cool to acknowledge these frivolous compositional follies? Well, actually no. Thelonious Monk shamelessly mined ragtime and stride piano, reshaping its raw energies. And John Coltrane's compressed, sped-up saxophone lines – his so-called "sheets of sound" – built on Monk's palette of gestures. And Coltrane's example would galvanise Steve Reich and Jimi Hendrix – and The Doors and Evan Parker – and about every emerging jazz and rock musician of the 1960s and 70s – into action, fuelling revolutions to come...

SOURCE

THE MUSIC AND DANCE OF THE RAGTIME ERA

During the 19th century, most of America's music, dances and fashions were imported from Europe, as composers and dance masters emulated the latest styles from Paris and London. At the same time, African Americans were combining their native music with European forms, resulting in their spirituals and "Ethiopian Melodies" that were adopted by minstrel shows and American composers like Foster, Christy and Gottschalk. During the 1890s and early 1900s this unique African American music developed into a new sound – syncopated Ragtime music.

At the end of the 19th century, many Americans were becoming bored with the old music and dances, which were essentially those of their grandparents. The Twentieth Century was seen as a time to make great changes, so most people were ready for innovations, probably with the expectation that the changes would come from society's cultural leaders. But instead, many Americans began to find it "modern" to dance their Two-Step to the new Ragtime music from the rural South and Midwest. Some high society ballrooms embraced the African American Cake Walk as "the popular fad of popular society." In the early 1900s, Ragtime music gained a wider acceptance and was soon accompanying the new Four-Step (soon to be re-named the One-Step) and a spontaneous menagerie of "animal dances" such as the Grizzly Bear, Turkey Trot, Bunny Hug and Camel Walk, especially among the lower classes. By 1910, the popular phrase was, "Everybody's Doin' It Now," but in fact most of middle and upper class society was only talking about it. Many could not yet accept the new ragtime dances because of lower-class associations.

In 1911 the newlyweds Irene and Vernon Castle found themselves in the right place at the right time, exhibiting their versions of the new American dances in a Parisian dinner club. They became immensely popular in Paris, and their fame spread through Europe. When the Castles returned to Irene's New York home in 1912, their dancing set a new prototype for Americans to follow. The Castles were a young, elegant, attractive, wholesome, married couple who had become the rage of Parisian high society. In a word, they had class. If they could dance the new ragtime dances with propriety, then all levels of society could, and did. The Castles were joined by other exemplars, such as Joan Sawyer, Maurice Mouvet and Florence Walton, all becoming catalysts in an explosive new dance mania. And after two centuries of Americans dancing in the European manner, Europe was now importing the latest music and dances from America. 

During the ragtime dance craze, the ballrooms were dominated by the One-Step, a dance where a couple merely walked one step to each beat of the music. Its immense popularity was due primarily to its simplicity, so that even novices could be modern. Those who were especially fond of the new dancing had a wide variety of other steps and styles to choose from. The Argentine Tango, which had been received with great acclaim in Paris, was renowned for its flirtations with sensuality, previously forbidden in public dancing. In contrast, the Hesitation Waltz was characterized by an elegant, almost balletic grace. The Maxixe was a swaying Brazilian two-step (polka) that was thought of as a Brazilian Tango. Vernon and Irene danced the One-Step in a unique style that became known as the Castle Walk. The Half-and Half was an unusual hesitation waltz in 5/4 time, accompanied by even more obscure experiments in 7/4 time. Lastly, the Fox-Trot, which combined slow and quick steps in a wide variety of patterns, was introduced in the last months before "The Great War."

World War I brought an end to the ragtime era dance craze in 1914-15. Dance floors thinned as men in Europe and then America left for war. Vernon Castle joined the Royal Flying Corps. But for a brief four years, the "modern dancing" craze redefined social dancing for the new 20th century, while also changing prototypes for personal relationships, both on and off the dance floor...

SOURCE

FORGOTTEN ONES: EVELYN NESBIT

One of the real life people that was portrayed in the musical Ragtime was vaudeville star Evelyn Nesbit. Not many people at all remember her and what she brought to the Ragtime era. Known as "the Girl in the Red Velvet Swing", her husband, Harry Kendall Thaw, killed her lover, noted New York Architect Stanford White, and the story was made into a movie, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955), with actress Joan Collins playing her role.

Her life was considered typical of the excesses of the Gilded Age before World War I. Born Florence Evelyn Nesbit, in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, she was the daughter and oldest child of a moderately wealthy and influential lawyer, Winfield Scott Nesbit. When her father died in 1893, leaving large debts, the family suddenly became destitute, and for years, the family lived in poverty. In 1900, when Evelyn turned 16, her copper colored hair and adolescent beauty became noticed by local artists, and she earned money for the family by posing as a model, soon becoming the family's sole breadwinner. To earn more money, in 1901 the family moved to New York City, where she would pose for noted artists of the time, including painters Charles Dana Gibson and Frederick Church, and photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer.

Gibson supposedly used her to illustrate his famous Gibson Girl paintings. That same year, she caught the attention of acclaimed architect Stanford White, who although married, was a notorious womanizer who had numerous affairs. In 1901, White was America's leading architect, considered the principle designer and arbiter of what was taste in architecture. He had founded several elite clubs, made large donations to charity and promoted several New York civic institutions.

White also had a dark side, specializing in sex with young teenaged girls, and despite his sexual appetite, he would also take care of them financially while he was courting them. In his private penthouse apartment at Madison Square Gardens which he had furnished with wall and ceiling mirrors, and a red velvet swing for his young girls to ride in, he would seduce the young girls. He supposedly took Evelyn's virginity and had a short affair with her, before moving on to other lovers. A few months later, when she became pregnant by young actor John Barrymore, White arranged for her to be sent away to a New Jersey boarding school, where she had an abortion disguised as an operation for appendicitis. Returning to New York City, Evelyn became lovers with Harry Thaw, lazy and wealthy son of a coal and railroad baron. Thaw was spoiled, living off his parents largesse at the tune of $80,000 a year, had a hot temper, and was considered a sexual sadist among the showgirls he courted; despite these less than desirable qualities, she eventually married him on April 4, 1905, at the age of 20. They would have one child, a son, Russell William Thaw (1910-1984). Harry Thaw was extremely jealous of her previous lovers, and when they ran into Stanford White twice on the evening of June 25, 1906, once at a dinner restaurant and later at the performance of the play "Mam'zelle Champagne" at the Madison Square Garden Theater, Thaw suddenly produced a pistol and shot White three times in the face, killing him instantly, while shouting "You'll never see that woman again."

Thaw was tried twice for murder, the first trial was deadlocked, and the second trial found him guilty of temporary insanity after Evelyn testified that White had raped her (while White had seduced her, there is some question about whether it was rape; different stories exist). Thaw spent several years in the Mattawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and in 1915 was declared legally sane and released. Following his release, Thaw divorced Nesbit, and she returned to vaudeville to earn a living, later becoming a silent film actress and dancer. In 1916, she briefly married her dancing partner, Jack Clifford, who abandoned her two years later, and she spent much of the remainder of her life living quietly with her son in Northfield, NJ. She would struggle with alcoholism, drug addiction, and move around a lot, struggling to make ends meet. Occasionally, her ex-husband Thaw would help her with some money, but never for very long. When Thaw died in 1947, he remembered Evelyn with $10,000 in his will (his estate was worth over $1 million). In her later years, she would teach ceramics to earn money, and died at the age of 82 in a nursing home in Santa Monica, California..

SOURCE

RAGTIME: THE FORGOTTEN MUSICAL

Way back in 1996 I had the opportunity to see one of my favorite musicals when I saw a production of Ragtime in Toronto for its world premiere. I forgot about the show until this past year when I rediscovered the music of this show all over again. Since our culture forgets its history often, I think the Ragtime era is a time in America that is sadly forgotten. This production captured that bygone era. Based on the 1975 novel by E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime tells the story of three groups in the United States in the early 20th century: African Americans, represented by Coalhouse Walker Jr., a Harlem musician; upper-class suburbanites, represented by Mother, the matriarch of a white upper-class family in New Rochelle, New York; and Eastern European immigrants, represented by Tateh, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia.

Historical figures including Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, Booker T. Washington, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Stanford White, Harry Kendall Thaw, Admiral Peary, Matthew Henson, and Emma Goldman are represented in the stories.

The musical had its world premiere in Toronto, where it opened at the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts (later renamed the Toronto Centre for the Arts) on December 8, 1996,  produced by Canadian impresario Garth Drabinsky and his Livent Inc., the Toronto-production company he headed. The US premiere was at the Shubert Theatre, Los Angeles in June 1997.The musical opened on Broadway on January 18, 1998 as the first production in the newly opened Ford Center for the Performing Arts. Directed by Frank Galati and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, Ragtime closed on January 16, 2000 after 834 performances and 27 previews. The original cast included Brian Stokes Mitchell, Marin Mazzie, Peter Friedman and Audra McDonald, who were all nominated for Tony Awards, and also included Judy Kaye, Mark Jacoby and Lea Michele. The production was conducted by David Loud.

The production received mixed reviews, with critics noting that the dazzling physical production (with a $10 million budget, including fireworks and a working Model T automobile) overshadowed problems in the script. Ben Brantley's review in The New York Times was headlined "A diorama with nostalgia rampant." It led the 1998 Tony Awards with thirteen Tony Award nominations, but Disney's The Lion King won as Best Musical. The musical won awards for Best Featured Actress (McDonald), Original Score, Book, and Orchestrations. According to The New York Times, "The chief competition for The Lion King was Ragtime, a lavish musical."The New York Times also noted that "The season was an artistic success as well, creating one of the most competitive Tony contests in years, with a battle in almost every category capped by the titanic struggle for the best musical award between Ragtime with 13 nominations and The Lion King with 11." The Broadway production was not financially successful, and some Broadway insiders consider its lavish production to have been the financial "undoing" of Livent.

The music is outstanding and catchy - and each song is woven together into the fabric of the plot that it is seemless. The show is still being performed regionally, but I wish the show would be revived. It would make an excellent movie musical. I'm not sure Hollywood things the story is important enough, but the story of racism, the class system, and other things that plague our country are still a factor in 2019 as much as it was in 1909. The soundtrack to Ragtime is a fullfilling soundtrack to get but it does not match seeing the show in person...

COMING SOON: RAGTIME ERA STORIES

Is there anyone out there who is fascinated with the Ragtime era of the early 20th century as much as I am? Probably not, but that will not stop me from having a Ragtime theme next month. Running from April 8th - April 29th, all of the stories on my blog will have a Ragtime theme. I hope you'll enjoy the theme as we remember this bygone era!