Having the Final Word on the Titanic

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For those interested in the sinking of that incredible ocean liner, and the upcoming centennial of the disaster, please check out my friend Jack's blog--it contains many details and first hand interviews of the sinking.  

"Maple Leaf Rag" - Sidney Bechet and His New Orleans Feetwarmers

This is a 1932 rrecording by the great saxophonist/clarinetist Sidney Bechet, contemporary of Louis Armstrong and other great lights of American jazz.

For more about Mr. Bechet: http://www.sidneybechet.org/about-sidney-bechet/

The recording here is based on a 1899 composition by the "King of the Ragtime Composers", Scott Joplin, born in Marshall, Texas in 1868. Joplin, was underappreciated in his own lifetime. "Maple Leaf Rag" was his biggest hit in his lifetime and it aforded him time to work on other rags and two operas, neither of the latter being a success. The song title came from "The Maple Leaf Club", dubbed " a not -too respectable establishment in the red light district" of Sedalia, Missouri, than a thriving community where Joplin also went to music classes at the local college.

His groundbreaking musical pieces finally got the recognition he deserved--fifty-sixty years too late for Joplin, who died in 1917-- when his work was used in the 1973 Oscar-winning film "The Sting" with Paul Newman and Robert Redford as savvy con-men in the 1930's. (Why music from the turn of the 20th century was used in a film set decades later in Depresion America puzzled me when the film was released.)

But to more important matters:

Scott Joplin bridged the improvised syncopations of ragtime with the composition style of other types of concert and dance music. He traveled all over America as a young man, a prolific piano performer and composer, later making St. Louis his home.

Joplin first composed what was called "jig music" in Taxarkana, Texas and Sedalia. It was called "jig" because the infectious rhythms caused people to break into a jig. It combined the harmonies of black music with the marches and dances of the Old World that white Americans were used to.

Thirty years on, Sidney Bechet's jazzmen took the waltz-y elements out of the tune and made it pure hot jazz. Hope you enjoy!