From Barrelhouse To Broadway: The Musical Odyssey Of Joe Jordan

Chances are, if you know anything at all about ragtime, you have heard of Scott Joplin. Joplin was originally from Sedalia, MO, and spent several years in St. Louis, the city where, at the turn of the century, ragtime was king. Among a number of younger composers who, like Joplin, frequented St. Louis' Silver Dollar Saloon and admired its resident "perfesser" Tom Turpin was pianist and composer Joe Jordan, who went on to an international career that took him from Chicago to Broadway, to England and, in his sixties, into the U.S. military as a decorated officer. That we know the name of Joplin, and not that of Jordan, who lived right up until a couple of years before the Academy Award-winning film The Sting was released, is just one of those vagaries of the way time sometimes affects the reputation of deserving people. Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra have decided to redress this omission through an excellent career survey, From Barrelhouse to Broadway: The Musical Odyssey of Joe Jordan on New World Records. The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra is a flexible period ensemble that specializes in American music of the early 1900s and plays it in a configuration resembling the typical "theater orchestra" of that day, sometimes with original orchestrations and at others in expertly made, period-appropriate arrangements. The program here is widely varied, consisting of songs, rags, tangos, a political rallying song for Theodore Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" campaign of 1912, waltzes and vaudeville routines, and so on. Each setting is suited to the piece, and the album is sequenced in a way that no single genre dominates another. The aspect of Joe Jordan's work that seems most "typical" is his ability and creativity in a wide variety of genres. Whereas Joplin's output is dominated by ragtime and capably represents his interests in other styles only to a lesser degree, it is clear that Jordan could readily express himself in any of the idioms known to him, and that his surviving output reflects it. The song Sweetie Dear is heard as a song and in a fox trot form and Jordan's piano piece The Whippoorwill Dance, discovered by Benjamin in manuscript, draws equally from Joplin and from the kind of piano character piece more typically associated with Edward MacDowell and Eastwood Lane, just to cite a couple of examples of Jordan's flexibility. Joplin did not live very long and encountered exploitation from both sides of the aisle in terms of race; by comparison, the exceptionally hard-working and inventive Jordan lived long enough to develop respectability and gain recognition across the board. If this brief summary does not convince you of Jordan's significance, the generous 38-page essay included in the booklet for From Barrelhouse to Broadway: The Music Odyssey of Joe Jordan hopefully will. The performances here are lively and spontaneous when needed, yet restrained and demure when the music calls for it. The singing, mainly by tenor Trevor B. Smith and soprano Bernadette Boerckel, happily avoids the kind of over-arch vocalizing one often hears in these kinds of re-creations. The dance numbers are delightfully toe tapping, as well, and the Paragon plays them with pep -- one would be hard pressed to find a reason to discourage anyone, particularly those inclined toward the pre-jazz popular music of the early twentieth century, from checking out New World's generally excellent From Barrelhouse to Broadway: The Musical Odyssey of Joe Jordan.
© TiVo