The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, Rick Benjamin
Release Date: 26 January 2018
Label: ECM
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 093228079521
Genres: Jazz Early Jazz
Description
Rick Benjamin (conductor) says of this recording:
"This is the third volume of Paragon Ragtime Orchestra recordings documenting the music of important African-American composers from late 19th- and early 20th-century New York City.
The inspiration for this effort came about twenty-five years ago, when I read James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan (1930), a fascinating chronicle of the city's black artistic life from the Victorian era to the Harlem Renaissance. I came to Johnson's volume after finishing Eileen Southern's The Music of Black Americans (1971), a wider-ranging academic work, but a no less revealing one. After reading these books I was excited to listen to the music they had described. But this was problematic: I discovered remarkably few available recordings of historic African-American music, and even fewer to represent New York's pioneering black composers. This inability to actually experience a considerable span of our musical heritage was a void that needed to be filled. Clearly it was time for a carefully curated new recording of first-rate performances played from authentic scores.
Fifteen years and three Black Manhattan volumes later, [the first was issued in 2003], we have recorded three and a half hours of this previously neglected music: sixty pieces by thirty-two outstanding African-American composers, spanning the seminal years of the 1870s to the early 1920s. It is our hope that these efforts have started to close this gap in America's cultural memory. Our even greater hope is that these recordings will enable the world to rediscover this magnificent music and the gifted, spirited, and persevering people who gave it to us." - Rick Benjamin, conductor, Paragon Ragtime Orchestra.
Tracklisting
The Lyris Quartet; Cedric Berry, Alyssa Park, Timothy Loo, Michael Matsuno, Jon Stehney, Sidney Hop
Present Music, Ariadne Greif, David Bloom
Trygve Seim; Frode Haltli
Tord Gustavsen Trio
Marilyn Crispell; Gary Peacock; Paul Motian
Lucian Ban; Mat Maneri
Louis Sclavis; Benjamin Moussay
Keith Jarrett; Gary Peacock; Paul Motian
