All the music documented on this second instalment of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra’s ‘Black Manhattan’ was written before Louis Armstrong made his debut in a recording studio with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1923. That date is important. By the mid-1920s Armstrong’s liberating approach to rhythm had revolutionised black music; jazz properly became jazz when Armstrong embedded a swing feel inside the plodding dependability of 4/4 time.

But even to most jazz aficionados, black music before jazz remains somewhat mysterious and unknowable: the archeology of scratchy 78s; the awkward truth that too many important musicians never committed anything to disc. The PRO’s director Rick Benjamin performs these period pieces using authentic 1920s instruments and original orchestrations. ‘To 21st-century eyes,’ he writes, ‘the list of composers may seem curious, a few recognisable names mingled with the unfamiliar.’ Scott Joplin has instant name recognition now but back in the day, Benjamin argues, he was a hick-from-the-sticks nobody compared to Bert Williams and Al Johns.

And listening to Joplin’s ‘Pine Apple Rag Song’, sung with spry verve by Anita Johnson, a curious paradox is revealed. Joplin’s syncopated fancies and melodic inventiveness – lines swerving free of the accompaniment – are far closer to the embryonic spirit of the music, jazz, that black America would soon be celebrating than the Euro-balladry of Williams’s ‘Nobody’ or Johns’s ‘Honey Lamb’. Which is not to denigrate these finely crafted songs, rather to stress how distorting the passage of time can be. ‘Nobody’ masquerades as comic hokum but behind the jaunty melody and trombone slides is an important parable about racial identity – a mirror to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

The virtuosity of the PRO comes to the fore in ‘Down in Honky Tonky Town’, a fleet rhythmic one-step – they properly nail the nuanced distinction between a one-step and ragtime. Hearing Frederick Bryan’s ‘Bell Hop Rag’ and Eubie Blake’s ‘Fizz Water’ in authentic period style – somewhere between Sousa, palm court orchestra and an anticipation of 1920s jazz – is archeology well worth digging.