The first thing I learned was the 'St Louis Blues' when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.
It is never right to play ragtime fast.
I extract what I consider the best material from different sources. But often the material I perform comes from a very strange location in history, which are minstrel shows.
I love swing, jazz, blues, standards. I love the American songbook, Gershwin, Berlin. It's all that. So I'm born in the wrong era and I just don't fit into the 21st century at all.
I had left 'Ragtime' - and 'Ragtime' was a completely different beast, no pun intended, than 'The Lion King'.
I also like the banging piano - that old good-time piano.
Don t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.
What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians... All publication s masquerading under the name of ragtime are not the genuine article... That real ragtime of the higher class is rather difficult to play is a painful truth which most pianists have discovered. Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music... Joplin ragtime is destroyed by careless or imperfect rendering, and very often players lost the effect entirely by playing too fast.
There are wonderful museums with lots of photographs of 1920's musicals.
Vaudeville was characterized by sunny optimism, acts that were uplifting, cheerful, and clean. It provided a fanciful, magical escape, but after Black Friday, the tone of American entertainment changed almost overnight.
Ragtime was my lullaby.
My great-grandmother was in one of the first girl bands, in the 1920s. Their outfits were mental: velvet bloomers with big ribbons and headpieces. They were brilliant.
One day the 'Maple Leaf' will make me King of Ragtime Composers.
I don't think today's younger audience... would even know what 1920s musicals were like.
We hear about the Gershwins, the Kerns, and the Berlins, but there were some great little writers like Theodore Morse, Charles K. Harris, and Ernest R. Ball, who wrote 'Let the Rest of the World Go By.'
Black people have always loved the blues - they basically created the blues.
Let me see you do the 'rag time dance'... Turn left and do the 'Cake walk prance'... Turn the other way and do the 'Slow drag'... Now take your lady to the world's fair (...) And do the 'rag time dance.'
My appearance was always good and my ability to play on the piano, especially ragtime, which was then at the height of its vogue, made me a welcome guest.
My end goal in the piano is to play Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag.'
I can't go into a bar anywhere without someone starting to play 'the Entertainer'.
Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at 'hateful ragtime' no longer passes for musical culture.
A lot of '20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.
