Joshua Rifkin's recordings of
Scott Joplin's piano rags for Nonesuch in the 1970s redefined ragtime as an incipient African-American-based classical music rather than an upbeat predecessor to jazz, and since then ragtime recordings have fallen on the two sides of a pretty sharp divide, with pianists on both sides often contributing original rags to the repertory. This disc by Florida-based pianist and composer
Gary Smart tends sharply toward the
Rifkin side, with his notes explicitly asserting ragtime's debt to classical music, a position
Joplin himself, who wrote ballet and opera, would have enthusiastically endorsed. His performances of big, harmonically ambitious rags by
Joseph Lamb, James Scott, and others are quite nice: slow, with plenty of pedal, bringing out the
Chopin-esque qualities of classic ragtime, and free of the somewhat mechanical beat
Rifkin favors. His version of
Joplin's Gladiolus Rag misses the grandeur and sweeping momentum in the piece, but in the more intimate Grace and Beauty of James Scott he's exceptional. Much of the program is given over to
Smart's own rags. Newly composed ragtime also tends to fall on either side of a dichotomy, this time between pieces that incorporate jazz rhythms and those that follow the novelty ragtime of the 1920s in using a range of keyboard effects.
Smart falls into the latter category, with pieces that, even if they're not particularly light in tone, rely on programmatic effects, quotations, and fancy keyboard lines while keeping the basic ragtime bass intact. They're pleasant enough even if they lack the organic beauty of the classics. The new ragtime compositions of Chicagoan Randall Robinson have made such a splash precisely because they thread the needle in making ragtime contemporary: they're quite free in rhythm and spirit, yet they're unmistakably rags.
Smart's rags are not in that class, but several of his performances of classic ragtime here are worth repeated hearings.