9/2/2023 0 Comments Joseph lamb ragtime![]() ![]() John Partridge, music director of the Wine Country Ragtime Festival, will discuss Lamb’s life and work illustrating his talk with live performances of some of Lamb’s greatest compositions. His ragtime compositions are lyrical and romantic and of such a high quality that he is now regarded as one of the greatest ragtime composers of that era. He was a young man from New Jersey who fell in love with the music of Scott Joplin and began writing rags of his own sometime around 1900. Most of the composers and performers from Ragtime’s “Golden Age” (1890 to 1920) were African-Americans from the Midwest. The presentation will kick-off the 2017 Wine Country Ragtime Festival. Having missed out on the post-World War I recording boom, he didn't come to records until the end of the 1950s, just before his death in 1960 at the age of 72.Local music scholar John Partridge will discuss ragtime legend, “Joseph Lamb – Romantic Ragtimer,” at 6 p.m. He resumed performing, and then, in the early '50s, scholars Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis found him during the process of researching their book, They All Played Ragtime. ![]() He fell into relative obscurity when ragtime fell out of favor in the 1920s, and he lived the next three decades out of the public and musical eye until the end of the 1940s, when his music started coming back into fashion. He went on to write "The Bohemia," "American Beauty," "Alaskan Rag," and "Excelsior Rag." His eight-bar phrases gave his music a structure and character different from that of Joplin or Scott, and he thrived for most of the teens. Joplin took him under his wing and secured him a publisher for the piece, and Lamb's reputation was more or less made from that point on. He also had the unique opportunity to get Joplin's own imprimatur, when the two met at a publishing office in New York in 1908 - Lamb later played his "Sensation Rag" for the man who had inspired him, and got his blessing and endorsement for it. ![]() When he started writing music, in 1896, it was in that style, and he ended up authoring a dozen pieces that immortalized him musically. He was also a serious fan of Scott Joplin and, as he started to compose, found ragtime as Joplin originated it to be a very natural fit for him by preference and temperament. He could sight read and, in fact, was very much a formal musician in the sense that he did not improvise at the piano. ![]() Lamb came from a musical family and had sisters who had formal training, and it was from them that he learned piano and composition. What's more, he maintained a "day job" in the textile business that kept him busy enough so that he was never a "star" in the manner of Joplin or Scott, and seldom made the effort to cultivate a following - he was a reluctant giant in his field. Louis roots of Joplin or Scott, or the Louisiana birthplace of Jelly Roll Morton, as it was possible to be. He came from a place as far removed from the St. Joseph Francis Lamb occupied a unique niche in the history of jazz, as one of the three "fathers of ragtime," alongside Scott Joplin and James Scott - but unlike the other two, Lamb was white, and came from the Northeast (Montclair, NJ, no less), and would seem an unlikely candidate for such a position in history. ![]()
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