Few are left who will actually remember ragtime as an ebullient piano-style popular music of their youth. Many more will easily remember the rediscovery of its original leading exponent, Scott Joplin, when his music was used for the soundtrack of the film The Sting. But although all but ignored until this rediscovery, the music had one great advantage over improvised jazz (that is, most jazz in the period concerned) in that the notated music could be played again by today's pianists with some considerable claim to authenticity; whereas earlier jazz improvisations were lost on the New Orleans air, remembered only by enthusiasts with, alas, all too humanly fallible memories.
Yet our knowledge of earlier ragtime styles had a limitation of its own, a different one. It was that the knowledge was concentrated on one man, Scott Joplin, whose written work has in today's printed and recorded availability pretty well monopolized the field. This new appearance, however, on record of performances from the written scores of other ragtime composers of the period, suddenly throws a great deal of most welcome light on the matter.
The three composers chosen for re-illumination after some 80 years do indeed seem to be well chosen. Of them James Scott seems closest in style to Joplin himself; if listening blind I would, I think, certainly be ready to believe that these were unfamiliar Joplin rags. Joseph Lamb not so; an element of poetry enters more into his scheme of things than of either Scott or Joplin himself.
But it is the music of the Brazilian musician Ernesto Nazareth that seems most remote from the North American rags, a distinction made by the present record's title adding Tangos to Rags in the collective listing. The tangos themselves often seem to owe quite a lot to classical composition techniques; perhaps this is not surprising, for the record's informative booklet tells us that Nazareth and Villa-Lobos were colleagues in the same Rio de Janeiro cinema orchestra. Milhaud, in a wartime diplomatic post in Rio at the time, wrote later that Nazareth's ''elusive, mournful, liquid playing gave me deeper insight into the Brazilian soul''.
For us today, deeper insights abound. Those insights are very largely initiated by Joshua Rifkin's booklet; and everywhere they are aided and abetted by his exceedingly resourceful piano-playing. If ragtime is at all within your field, do not hesitate for a moment.'