Hal Isbitz

The first showing wasn’t quite over yet, so we bought our tickets and loitered around in the lobby, munching popcorn and waiting for the movie to end. I wandered over to the doors in to the theatre and peaked in, just in time to catch the last two minutes of the film. If there’s one film you don’t want to see the last two minutes of first, it’s The Sting.

Despite the fact that I now knew the ending, The Sting was a revelation. Not because of the highly anticipated reunion of two of that generation’s biggest heartthrobs, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (the reason at least some of the people in our group were going). Not because of the snappy dialogue, or tight plotting, or polished look of the film – I was a long way from being able to appreciate those things. What was a real revelation for me – and for many others that year – was the music.

By the 1970s, ragtime had largely fallen into the bin of forgotten musical styles. The charming, piano-based precursor to jazz was just too old and square and wholesomely enjoyable to be given much regard in those tumultuous times, when the optimism and communal power of the '60s was giving way to the solipsistic narcissism of the '70s, when the drugs that had been used to free the mind were being used to obliterate it, when everybody in power seemed perverse and corrupt, all the way up to the President of the United States.

Even though, technically speaking, the charming rags of Scott Joplin were an anachronistic choice for the film (which takes place in the 1930s, a couple of decades after ragtime hit its popular peak), it worked really well with the story, and the country was plunged into a brief nostalgia for this bygone music. And, for the first (and nearly last) time in my life, I was swept along with a national craze.

I adored ragtime. I loved the complicated, syncopated melodies, the exhilarating technique required to play it (ragtime is deceptively difficult to play, as I would soon discover) and the glorious joi de vivre that the music represented. It was the first music that really appealed to me – so much so that I redoubled my efforts to learn the piano so I could play The Entertainer.

America’s fascination with ragtime was short-lived, but I’ve held on to it since then. I begged for and eventually received a box set of the entire piano works of Scott Joplin for my birthday. I used to stack them up on the turntable (those were the days), and let them play for hours at a time, while I imagined that I was the owner/chef of an exclusive restaurant located on a giant farm that produced all of the food used in all the dishes, from the wheat in the bread to the chocolate in the desert. I don’t know what the hell that was about, but it was a brief secret fantasy of mine for a few months – one I’ve never shared before this very moment.

As I got older, I came to appreciate other aspects of ragtime, like the remarkable fact that its leading practitioners and creators were black, and this just thirty years after the Civil War and a good 60 years before Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King brought the race wars to a boiling point. It was almost inconceivable to me that at that time in American history, popular culture was ruled by its lowest class. Later still, I came to appreciate just how that worked, and how it didn’t necessarily confer upon Joplin and Joseph Lamb and the others the privileges of society, and how that paradigm gets repeated over and over throughout history (even old man Aesop was a slave, making up fables to curry favor with those in power to spare his life).

Anyway, I was fired up by ragtime, and endeavored to learn some of it. Until I actually saw the sheet music, that is. And then my enthusiasm waned. Ragtime, especially as a precursor to the “stride” piano style of early (especially New York) jazz, is murderously difficult to play, as virtuosic as anything Liszt could spit out. So I got a book of (extremely) simplified transcriptions and contented myself with learning a couple of those. Although The Entertainer was the “theme” of The Sting and its most popular piece, I found myself drawn to the Maple Leaf Rag. So much so that I forced myself to sit down and, over the course of several months, painfully learn the piece as it was originally written. Or some of it, anyway.

This later got me in trouble when I decided to take piano lessons again. I had taken a couple of months worth of lessons when I was but a wee lad (wee-er than I was at this point, which was about 11), but I hated it. I wanted to dig in and play Hungarian Rhapsodies, but had to content myself with The March of the Dooky Birds, or whatever crap was in that first book. I know I needed to learn the fundamentals first, but there was no fun in the fundamentals (just damentals) and the music was so insultingly bad that, even at that tender age, I couldn’t stand it, so I quit in favor of teaching myself. Learning a little ragtime later on made me want to get a little more formal training, so I signed up for some lessons with a local teacher (being as we lived at the Interlochen Arts Academy, there was no lack of overqualified instrumentalists around looking to make a few bucks). On the first day, the teacher asked me to play something for her so she could see what I knew, so I pulled up the bench and unreeled the first couple of minutes of the Maple Leaf Rag, hands hopping gracelessly around the keyboard (ragtime writers seem to want to use every note on the piano for each their pieces). Suitably impressed, she gave me work that was way over my head (and hands), and I quit again after struggling through a couple of tense and frustrating weeks (I didn’t want to learn how to play, I just wanted to play).

Predictably, the ragtime craze died down again (although not before inspiring a few odd artifacts, like the Scott Joplin Melody Maker kit I had which consisted of a couple of dozen cards with short musical phrases printed on them that you’d put together in random order to create a “wholly new and original” rag). Although it fell quickly out of favor, it still simmers around the edges of the culture, and bubbles up every now and then, like as the soundtrack for one of my all-time favorite films, Crumb.

There’s a great story about the recording of the Crumb soundtrack. Director Terry Zwigoff, who was in a ragtime/roots band with R. Crumb called the Cheap Suit Serenaders, wanted to score his documentary with old ragtime and blues songs, since both he and his subject loved them so much, but he couldn’t afford to pay to use existing recordings. Since getting the rights to use the sheet music is a lot cheaper than getting the rights to use a recorded performance, he bought the rights to a couple dozen pieces and then set out to get them recorded. Most of the tracks on the soundtrack are played on a guitar (a revelation to me, as I always thought solo ragtime was the exclusive domain of the piano), but there were a couple of Jellyroll Morton piano pieces he wanted to use (like the Frog-I-More Blues), so he contacted David Boeddinghaus, a well-respected jazz and ragtime piano player, to see if he’d be interested in recording them. He was and, as a bonus, he had some transcriptions of just the pieces Zwigoff wanted to use. When he came in for the recording session, he took a stack of old yellowing notebook paper out of his bag and put them on the piano. The recording went well and, after it was over, Zwigoff asked Boeddinghaus why he had copied the music out on such old paper. Boeddinghaus replied that he hadn’t copied it out on old paper, he did the transcriptions by himself. When he was 12. Clearly, they got the right man for the job.

At any rate, the ragtime flood released by The Sting dried up quickly but had soaked some people deeper than others. I still have a damp spot after all these years, and so does Hal Isbitz. A computer programmer with classical piano training, Isbitz was inspired to start writing rags in the 1970s. What he responded to was the more gentle, contemplative rags, like Solace, instead of the more stereotypically up-tempo numbers like The Entertainer or The Maple Leaf Rag (although, for the record, most people play ragtime too quickly – it’s much more leisurely than is generally realized). In the late '80s Isbitz discovered the Brazilian tangos of Ernesto Nazareth, and began blending these two influences together. On the surface, it’s a startling juxtaposition, but in practice, the two strands blend together beautifully. He has written over 50 pieces in this intriguing hybrid style, going so far as to win second prize in the 1997 Scott Joplin Foundation Ragtime Composition Contest for his piece Lazy Susan. The following year, well-regarded pianist John Arpin recorded a dozen of Isbitz’ “Latin rags” on a beautiful CD called Blue Gardenia. I heard a cut on the radio and was immediately entranced, and spent the next couple of weeks hunting down a copy of the disc (lots of luck). The pieces are uniformly excellent, and listening to them immediately sent me back 30 years, seating well-healed customers in my world-famous restaurant, and bringing them homemade crackers and fois gras squeezed from my own geese.