Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...John Green? Dana Suesse? Today no one can even pronounce some of these names, yet once upon a time--back in the 1920s and '30s--all four of these pianist-composers thrilled large audiences with a scintillating mix of ragtime, jazz and classical sounds that became known as novelty piano. Lost in the shadows cast by Gershwin's brilliance, they have been forgotten, and undeservedly...
...eight-CD project on the Pearl label called Keyboard Wizards of the Gershwin Era aims to change that. So too does a contemporary pianist named Peter Mintun, who is working to restore novelty piano to its rightful place in the history of our popular culture. He recently opened a four-month engagement playing novelty compositions and pop classics at the posh Carlyle Hotel in New York City...
Novelty can be thought of as a kind of long-haired half sibling to ragtime. Tony Caramia, associate professor of piano at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and one of the country's leading experts in ragtime and novelty piano, explains that "unlike the ragtime musicians, who were young, itinerant blacks, the novelty folks were primarily classically trained. These influences showed up in the more advanced harmonies in their music. It still sounds like ragtime, and the left hand is boom, chunk, boom, chunk, but they leave no syncopated stone unturned...
...record sleeve--deserve a place in musical history alongside such crossover classics as Gershwin's Concerto in F, Igor Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto and Aaron Copland's clarinet concerto. "Dana Suesse was a marvelous pianist," says Mintun, who wrote the liner notes for Pearl's Suesse album. "Her piano solos painted vivid tonal pictures of exciting urban life. You hear little hints of Debussy or Ravel in her work, yet you also hear the elements of something new in that period that they called jazz...
Overseeing the Pearl series is music historian Artis Wodehouse, whose Gershwin Plays Gershwin album won raves when it came out in 1994. For that CD, Wodehouse rerecorded Gershwin's piano-roll performances by playing them on a Yamaha Disklavier, a kind of computer-driven player piano. The Pearl set is based on actual historic recordings--78s, Edison 80s, radio-broadcast acetates. Wodehouse painstakingly tracked them down around the country and cleaned them up for modern ears. "It's a shame that they got lost in the shuffle," says Wodehouse. "But great pop music comes back, and that is what...