Maple Leaf Rag played by Scott Joplin himself

[MathOfInsects]

6 hours ago, analogika said:

 

The 1992 claims to be a wax cylinder recording of an original Scott Joplin piano roll (not dated). Something something wrong box eBay blablabla fishy fishy fish. This version is shuffled, and it's a heavily abridged version of the piece. 

 

The link by El Lobo is a roll supposedly from 1916. This one isn't shuffled, and it's actually the complete piece. 

So…how did Scott Joplin play it? 

Two different recordings made at two different times. The Santa Barbara recording was from earlier in Joplin's life, before his skills deteriorated.
 

"While Joplin never made an audio recording, his playing is preserved on seven piano rolls for use in mechanical player pianos. All seven were made in 1916. Of these, the six released under the Connorized label show evidence of editing to correct the performance to strict rhythm and add embellishments, probably by the staff musicians at Connorized. Berlin theorizes that by the time Joplin reached St. Louis, he may have experienced discoordination of the fingers, tremors, and an inability to speak clearly—all symptoms of the syphilis that killed him in 1917. Biographer Blesh described the second roll recording of "Maple Leaf Rag" on the UniRecord label from June 1916 as "shocking...disorganized and completely distressing to hear." While there is disagreement among piano-roll experts as to how much of this is due to the relatively primitive recording and production techniques of the time, Berlin notes that the "Maple Leaf Rag" roll was likely to be the truest record of Joplin's playing at the time. The roll, however, may not reflect his abilities earlier in life.

 

A stronger performance, by Joplin, is held in the University of California at Santa Barbara's cylinder archive. It was apparently found in a mislabeled box of wax cylinders sold on eBay, long after Blesh examined the June 1916 recording, and is likely to date from earlier in Joplin's life, in April 1916. Although that recording is severely damaged, a cleaned-up MIDI version reveals a considerably stronger performance."

[Floyd Tatum]

1 hour ago, MathOfInsects said:

"While Joplin never made an audio recording,

--snip, snip, snip --

a cleaned-up MIDI version reveals a considerably stronger performance."

 

MOI, those two paragraphs in quotes, from where where are they quoted?

[MathOfInsects]

Just now, Floyd Tatum said:

MOI, those two paragraphs in quotes, from where where are they quoted from?

Sorry, I meant to link it: Wiki. But before I went there I checked into that collection they have at UCSB. Safe to say it is not just "stuff in a box," that's a flagship collection for them and we can feel confident in the provenance of the items in it. 

[Floyd Tatum]

7 minutes ago, MathOfInsects said:

Sorry, I meant to link it: Wiki. But before I went there I checked into that collection they have at UCSB. Safe to say it is not just "stuff in a box," that's a flagship collection for them and we can feel confident in the provenance of the items in it. 

I'm not necessarily convinced of its provenance.   I'm from Missouri.   Things can be faked.

[MathOfInsects]

14 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

I'm not necessarily convinced of its provenance.   I'm from Missouri.   Things can be faked.

Well, of course they can. But if it were such an obvious fake that Joe Internet can spot it just by virtue of what state he's in, you don't think they'd maybe notice that too? Maybe they're even from Missouri!

This seems like a very strange and arbitrary hill to die on, but knock yourself out.

[Floyd Tatum]

I didn't know I was dying on any hill.   In that case, I believe it!    😃   <-- (joe internet)

I'm just expressing my skepticism is all.

[Floyd Tatum]

I just looked at and listened to the UCSB Cylinder Archive for this recording/piano roll/brown wax cylinder.   What they have is a brown wax cylinder.  At the beginning of the brown wax home recording, we hear somebody say "The Maple Leaf Rag, played by Scott Joplin".   At the end of the brown wax recording, we hear "Recorded in Derwood, Maryland, September twenty-seventh, nineteen ninety two."

If that brown wax recording is from 1916, why does it have "recorded in 1992" on the wax recording?

There's no proof that this is a piano roll from 1916, or that Scott Joplin played that piano roll (as others have noted in this thread)

I remain highly skeptical.

My fellow Missourians would be proud, even though I've never been there.😄

 

[MathOfInsects]

17 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

I just looked at and listened to the UCSB Cylinder Archive for this recording/piano roll/brown wax cylinder.   What they have is a brown wax cylinder.  At the beginning of the brown wax home recording, we hear somebody say "The Maple Leaf Rag, played by Scott Joplin".   At the end of the brown wax recording, we hear "Recorded in Derwood, Maryland, September twenty-seventh, nineteen ninety two."

If that brown wax recording is from 1916, why does it have "recorded in 1992" on the wax recording?

There's no proof that this is a piano roll from 1916, or that Scott Joplin played that piano roll.

I remain highly skeptical.

My fellow Missourians would be proud, even though I've never been there.

There seems to be some confusion here.

 

It is not a recording of Scott Joplin. It is a recording of a piano roll being played by a player piano. The recording was made in 1992. The roll it was played from was created in 1916, by Scott Joplin.

 

Does that clarify?

[Floyd Tatum]

No clarify.   It claims to be of a 1916 piano roll, and it claims that that piano roll was made by SJ, but there's no proof at all.   And why would someone make a recording using a wax cylinder in 1992 (the guy's voice is on the cylinder, don't forget)?  The whole thing doesn't make sense.   It was probably some guy in 1992 playing around at recording a wax cylinder for fun.   As for the source of the MLR, who knows?   Can't fool a Missourian.   Especially a Canadian who's never been there.

 

[MathOfInsects]

1 minute ago, Floyd Tatum said:

No.   It claims to be of a 1916 piano roll, and it claims that that piano roll was made by SJ, but there's no proof at all.   And why would someone make a recording using a wax cylinder in 1992 (the guy's voice is on the cylinder, don't forget)?  The whole thing doesn't make sense.   It was probably some guy in 1992 playing around at recording a wax cylinder for fun.   As for the source of the MLR, who knows?   Can't fool a Missourian.

The library catalog listing does not have anything to do with establishing something’s validity. It simply describes the item. So you won’t find proof there. 
 

I will leave the rest for you and the good people of Missouri to work out.
 

 

[analogika]

So apparently, in April of 1916, Scott Joplin played his flagship ragtime with a hard swing, and a few months later, he played it completely straight. 

[MathOfInsects]

I agree, these are legitimate and obvious questions. It's just that the obviousness of them would no doubt be apparent to those doing the collecting, so their skepticism would out-Missouri even the Missouriest of us. 

This is from the Library of Congress. It describes and explains why there is such a difference in the two versions, including the possibility that the swung version was not played by Joplin. For what it's worth, the guy who wrote it is from Missouri.

The seven piano rolls likely reflect an effort to extract some income during this period. According to ragtime historian Bill Edwards, “Maple Leaf Rag” (1899) and “Magnetic Rag” (1914) were recorded in April 1916 at a Connorized studio with a marking master and then later punched. The following month, “Weeping Willow” (1903), “Something Doing” (1903), and “Pleasant Moments” (1909) were cut. In June, “Ole Miss Rag” by W.C. Handy, was made and in June, Joplin also recorded “Maple Leaf Rag” again on a Uni-Record label, punched master.

 

Much has been written about Joplin’s piano roll recordings. It is speculated that all but the Aeolian Uni-Record “Maple Leaf Rag” issue were probably heavily edited after Joplin cut the original master. In fact, well-known piano roll historian Douglas Henderson, has proposed that all of the Connorized rolls were actually cut and edited by staff arranger, William Axlmann. Joplin biographer Ed Berlin, however, suggests that Axlmann likely edited Joplin’s masters since parts of the recordings are not physically possible to be played by just one performer.

 

Thus, the final Uni-Record version is likely the most accurate reflection of Joplin’s keyboard ability. Unfortunately, it is poorly played as Joplin’s deteriorating motor skills undoubtedly impacted his performance. Joplin had enjoyed the reputation for being a good pianist, especially when playing his own compositions, something that is not fully evident on this roll.

 

When discussing piano roll play-back quality, authorities are always concerned with the impact of the play-back speed on tempo. After 1905, Joplin was known for printing, “Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast,” on his published sheet music. However, this admonition is frequently ignored as Joplin obviously did on the Uni-Record roll. In addition, Joplin takes unusual liberties with his compositions in recording six of the seven rolls. The speeds the actual equipment used to make the piano rolls is also variable and the Connorized rolls by 1916 even had a disclaimer that play-back speeds might need to be adjusted. When Mike Montgomery helped Arnie Caplin record the Biograph series of piano roll records in the 1970s, Mike was meticulously careful to adjust the play-back speed of each recording based on his extensive experience with Joplin’s music.

https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/RagtimeScottJoplin.pdf

[analogika]

Thank you for that research! 

 

So this rather poorly played, short version should be the only "original" then: 
 

 

It is not shuffled. 

[Mark Schmieder]

My mother bought the Nonesuch record when it came out. I always found the rags much more soulful when played slowly, and I hear a bit of swing even in that recording. It's funny timing, this thread, as earlier this week I read more about what led to jazz's development, and some of the information is only recently coming to light after having been lost or forgotten. It was a very gradual transition towards the beat being swung and quite an intriguing history altogether. Many players affected the outcome, and several genres were birthed in the process. Changes in instrument manufacturing played no small part as well, as is always the case with music evolution.

[Floyd Tatum]

5 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:

I agree, these are legitimate and obvious questions. It's just that the obviousness of them would no doubt be apparent to those doing the collecting, so their skepticism would out-Missouri even the Missouriest of us. 
---  snip snip ---

You have far more faith in the infallibility of institutions than I, sir.

 

I remain un-out-Missouriedly yours,

Joseph R. "Floyd Tatum" Internet   🙂

 

[MathOfInsects]

2 hours ago, Floyd Tatum said:

You have far more faith in the infallibility of institutions than I, sir.

 

I remain un-out-Missouriedly yours,

Joseph R. "Floyd Tatum" Internet   🙂

 

Well, I think it's just that I see a lot of real estate between "fallibility" and the starting presumption of ignorance. These are exact folks that a skeptic like you (and me) would need to check with to affirm or reject the skepticism. The wholesale devaluation of expertise is an unfortunate blight of our age.

 

Careful thinking is to be commended. But just remember that a starting position that assumes as a default that everything must be wrong, is the opposite of careful thinking. It's exactly as doctrinaire as unquestioning belief is.

[Baggypants]

15 hours ago, analogika said:

So apparently, in April of 1916, Scott Joplin played his flagship ragtime with a hard swing, and a few months later, he played it completely straight. 

 

All other provenance issues aside, why not? Joplin may have realised the only recording of his was a hard swing version and wanted a straight one 'For the record'. Maybe he heard the first recording back and didn't like it.

 

Maybe the the Clem Fandango doing the recording said he needed an un-swung recording or it wouldn't sell. Or are we suggesting Jopin couldn't switch styles? That seems even more unlikely. Do you never switch styles when playing your own compositions?

[analogika]

I'm not saying that he couldn't have switched styles. 

 

I'm saying that he wouldn't have switched styles. None of his pieces are notated as swing/shuffles, and AFAIK from brief research, the practice at the time was strictly binary, with the swing feel only really crossing over from Blues into Jazz about ten years after Joplin died.

I was hoping somebody more knowledgable could weigh in. 

Seeing as I play and teach this stuff, and I'm just plain interested, I believe there's value in knowing what how the composer intended his stuff to be played. 

[MathOfInsects]

I'm sure he did not switch styles, or at least intentionally.

Ragtime was generally played to allow the writing itself do the swinging--the "ragged" rhythms as written, but that’s a very general statement, and by the time of these rolls plenty of other stuff had happened.

The interplay between ragtime, blues, and jazz (and popular music) is complicated. Anything someone says today will be said differently in ten years. Even deciding what to call "the blues" is complicated during this time period, let alone the versions of it being done by brass bands using ragtime rhythms. (I probably taught the early jazz and early blues classes ten times, so had to tease this apart often.)

This era exactly spans the before and after of recorded music. Everything from before the advent of the recorded-music industry is based on incomplete history, wrapped up in no small part in the fact that the population playing this stuff was largely marginalized and the music itself was thought to be vulgar or primitive and not the stuff of scholarship or public interest. The first recorded jazz record was by a white band...

Piano rolls are as close as we can come to a "recording" for Joplin. They might be meaningful or they might not. Robert Johnson was thought for years to have a high voice, based on the wrong playback speed of his (only) sessions. You can find the slowed down versions on youtube if you're interested in how he really sounded. 

 

That's a complicated circumstance, and is a lot like this one. He "really" played and sang those songs. We can hear with our own ears "Robert Johnson." And yet it turns out not to represent him in nearly any meaningful way, except in maybe the raw fingering and strumming patterns if someone wants to study those.

Making all this harder, the ones writing the "history" were not the ones making it. So anything we know is filtered through a bunch of other lenses too. Even those Robert Johnson records are "filtered"--he was a professional musician who played a massive variety of styles for 7 or 8 hours a night. When it came time to record him, he was pushed toward a very, very, very small subset of his repertoire, for reasons beyond the artistic. 

 

In terms of teaching, in general you can tell students ragtime wasn't originally swung too hard beyond the composition, but that that's only because of where it was in time. We live in the future now; if someone wants to swing the f out of it, more power to them. We don't have any obligation to limit ourselves to the tools of one era, when we live 10 eras later. 

Also, FWIW, Joplin swings that rising diminished arpeggio pretty damn hard in that clumsy later recording, so I think the conversation is not as straightforward as we'd like to think. If anything it's possible Joplin himself meant to swing that later recording harder than he did and just didn't have the facility any more to pull it off, but that his editor was able to do it better on the early ones. 



 

 

 

[AnotherScott]

On 5/29/2023 at 5:25 PM, MathOfInsects said:

The wholesale devaluation of expertise is an unfortunate blight of our age.

 

Indeed. And now it has the potential to get that much worse, with AI capable of further blurring the lines between "legitimate" and "questionable" sources of information. I had thought the biggest credibility issue with something like ChatGPT was that, in pulling its information from sources on the internet, widely believed yet erroneous information could easily be further propagated as factual. It turns out, it's worse than that. If the reporting in the link below is to be believed (meta!), ChatGPT seems to be perfectly capable of just "making stuff up." It appears that its goal seems to be to present an answer that seems credible, rather than necessarily an answer that is correct. This is kind of terrifying.

 

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lawyer-chatgpt-fake-citations_n_64762bc5e4b02325c5dd4bf6

[time4jazz]

6 hours ago, AnotherScott said:

 

…ChatGPT seems to be perfectly capable of just "making stuff up." It appears that its goal seems to be to present an answer that seems credible, rather than necessarily an answer that is correct.

Wow, it appears that we’ve hit the point where AI really is just like humans!

[MathOfInsects]

I think there is probably some refinement still needed to differentiate (within the AI) what is generative and what is recapitulation. The circumstance with the lawyer sounds like what happened in the early days of self-driving cars. Yes, you can trust the tech to be better and quicker than you, but no, you cannot check all the way out and ride like it's a commuter train (yet). Human curation is still needed to weed out the noise. 

That lawyer's AI doesn't yet made a distinction between stuff that is real and stuff it creates that sounds real. The lawyer was reckless for submitting that unchecked. 

 

[konaboy]

and now here's MLR played by Woody himself, taking some inspiration from the original recording.

 

 

[CyberGene]

Excellent playing, Woody! I personally am not really sure about rags played with a swing feel because it turns them into stride, it’s not ragtime anymore. Other than that your playing is inspiring 👏🏻