Showing posts with label upright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label upright. Show all posts
Friday, December 24, 2021
To John
One day late last month, I looked in the obituaries section of the Omaha World Herald.
And I was shocked to find John F. McIntyre's name in there.
When wife Laura Vranes and parents Dan and Barbara McIntyre were listed among John's survivors, it hit me:
I met John and Laura on Labor Day 2013 (9-2-2013) at Omaha's Tree of Life Sculpture.
The occasion was the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area's "Play Me, I'm Yours" street piano art project.
By contributing Barbara's old Richardson upright piano to the local exhibit (and enabling Bill Hoover to paint the piano), and with Barb's okay to the contribution in the first place, Laura and John helped make the Omaha Metro's stop on Luke Jerram's "PMIY" tour a tremendous success.
The "Boston's Blog" post about the Tree of Life experience ("Monday, September 2, 2013: M-A-G-I-C!") is still up. (Check it out!)
John, you, Laura, and Barb enabled so many of us in the Omaha area to have so much fun during "Play Me's" time in the local spotlight.
Thank you so much for all the great things you've contributed.
Sunday, July 15, 2018
Now that's more like it!
For a while, the 2018 Ragtime to Riches Festival looked as if it was going to be a bust.
Only six people showed up to each of the last two early-July old-time piano celebrations here in the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area.
Fifty chairs were set up for spectators in Memorial Hall at the Big O's First Central Congregational United Church of Christ. The stage was set up with the greatest of care.
The doors to Memorial Hall at Omaha's oldest currently-practicing Protestant church were opened at 1:00 PM (Central time) on 7-8-2018.
Nobody came.
About ten minutes into the festival's open-piano session, I went over to the church's turn-of-the-20th-Century Anderson & Newton upright to go over the tunes I wanted to do as part of the event's workshop: "Four Ragtime Composers You Might Not Have Known About."
Well, 2:00 PM came...the very time the workshop was to begin.
Still, nobody came.
2:10 PM came and went. So did 2:20 PM.
And yet...nobody came.
Not even the two featured performers I was scheduled to play alongside.
Finally, at 2:31 PM, one of my fellow members of another local church (St. Paul United Methodist) walked inside First Central's Memorial Hall.
Marc May and I shot the breeze for a while as he and I wondered if this was going to be it...despite all the work to get the word out about the fourteenth annual Omaha ragfest.
One thing was for sure: The workshop had to get canceled.
Then...BOOM!
Between 2:45 PM and 3:10 PM, twelve people came inside...including featured performers Faye Ballard and Diana Stein.
At 3:05 PM (five minutes later than scheduled), I went up to bat first with R to R 2018's initial concert.
This time, instead of using songs whose titles include the names of states of the US (last year's personal R to R fare), I went for some tunes that were in the Number One spot on the various US pop music charts on Independence Day. And the first number in the concert was a ditty from 1892, "Throw Him Down, McCloskey," written by J.W. Kelly and recorded by a man named Charles Marsh. (Charles was one of music's first one-hit wonders: His wax cylinder made it up to the Number One spot on 6-18-1892 and stayed there for three weeks.)
My next number turned out to be Tin Pan Alley's first blockbuster hit: "After the Ball," the Charles K. Harris tune that sold six million pieces of sheet music once it hit the streets in 1892...and became a smash recording the next year when George J. Gaskin put his lips to it (and made it Number One for ten weeks, beginning on 4-29-1893).
Those were the only tunes where I used sheet music.
The remaining eight songs in my set were all done from memory..."Golden Slippers," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Hello, Ma Baby," "A Bird in a Gilded Cage," "The Preacher and the Bear," "Sweet Georgia Brown," and two from outside the 1890-1929 period: "Sentimental Journey" and "I Can't Stop Loving You."
Well, the crowd liked it. (Whew!)
Had to cut my set short so that Diana (a Memphis, TN native who, six weeks earlier, was one of the first finalists in the newly-created Senior Division competition at Mississippi's World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival) could make her Ragtime to Riches debut on time...4:15 PM.
Actually, Diana launched her set at 4:10 PM...when she took to the church's 2015 Yamaha grand piano.
It was great not only to see her again (first time since the 2012 OTPP Contest), but also to hear her again. The audience really enjoyed Diana's robust, powerful blend of rags, stride, boogie woogie, and blues...and she kicked it all off with two Scott Joplin numbers: "Magnetic Rag" and "Pineapple Rag." (Diana added two more of Scott's compositions later on in her thirteen-tune set: "Solace" and the one that kicked syncopation into high gear, "Maple Leaf Rag.")
Diana's versions of "Nickel in the Slot," "Singin' in the Rain," "Monkey Strut," and "Memories of You" stood out, too, as did her version of James Scott's "Climax Rag."
The community-college instructor closed out her concert with two Fats Waller tunes: The famous "Ain't Misbehavin'" and the not-as-well-known "Viper Strut."
Diana, what a debut you put on! You tore that Memorial Hall down!
At 7:00 PM, OTPP's contest coordinator kicked off this year's R to R anchor leg by firing off two medleys- one consisting of the theme songs of America's five Armed Forces branches, the other medley devoted to George M. Cohan's music.
Staying at the Yamaha grand piano, Faye changed the music to "Puttin' on the Ritz."
She likened her set to a party...and what a party it was!
To substantiate that, the Champaign, IL native went back to the medley well to join "Beer Barrel Polka" with "Too Fat Polka." And Faye showed two of ragtime's Big Three composers some love by doing James' "Frog Legs Rag" and Joseph Lamb's "Cleopatra Rag." Plus, the former University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana office manager put in old favorites like "It Had to Be You," "Mack the Knife," "Harlem Rag," and "Sailin' Away on the Henry Clay."
Faye's one of the first people to tell you that the Illinois-turned-Mississippi get-together is, at its core, a cutting contest. And as a case in point, she played her famous version of one of the rags Diana put in her own set: Luckey Roberts' "Pork and Beans."
After playing ten ditties, Faye turned it over to one of this year's C&F Junior Division finalists: Rich Bliesener, a thirteen-year-old who lives in and goes to school in Burlington, IA. (Rich's number was "Humpty Dumpty," a rag written in 1914 by Charley Straight...one of the coauthors of "Mockingbird Rag.")
Faye's fifteen-tune set ended with "Charleston Rag" and "12th Street Rag."
And then...the fun spilled over into the afterglow party, where Rich and Faye took to the two pianos.
In fact, Faye and Rich made this year's R to R afterglow the most successful one in the festival's history.
What's more, the Great Plains Ragtime Society took in $90 in ticket sales...a 50% increase from 2017.
Those of you who came to R to R 14.0, well...all I can say is:
Thanks for picking this festival up off the floor...and thanks for bringing the FUN!
Only six people showed up to each of the last two early-July old-time piano celebrations here in the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area.
Fifty chairs were set up for spectators in Memorial Hall at the Big O's First Central Congregational United Church of Christ. The stage was set up with the greatest of care.
The doors to Memorial Hall at Omaha's oldest currently-practicing Protestant church were opened at 1:00 PM (Central time) on 7-8-2018.
Nobody came.
About ten minutes into the festival's open-piano session, I went over to the church's turn-of-the-20th-Century Anderson & Newton upright to go over the tunes I wanted to do as part of the event's workshop: "Four Ragtime Composers You Might Not Have Known About."
Well, 2:00 PM came...the very time the workshop was to begin.
Still, nobody came.
2:10 PM came and went. So did 2:20 PM.
And yet...nobody came.
Not even the two featured performers I was scheduled to play alongside.
Finally, at 2:31 PM, one of my fellow members of another local church (St. Paul United Methodist) walked inside First Central's Memorial Hall.
Marc May and I shot the breeze for a while as he and I wondered if this was going to be it...despite all the work to get the word out about the fourteenth annual Omaha ragfest.
One thing was for sure: The workshop had to get canceled.
Then...BOOM!
Between 2:45 PM and 3:10 PM, twelve people came inside...including featured performers Faye Ballard and Diana Stein.
At 3:05 PM (five minutes later than scheduled), I went up to bat first with R to R 2018's initial concert.
This time, instead of using songs whose titles include the names of states of the US (last year's personal R to R fare), I went for some tunes that were in the Number One spot on the various US pop music charts on Independence Day. And the first number in the concert was a ditty from 1892, "Throw Him Down, McCloskey," written by J.W. Kelly and recorded by a man named Charles Marsh. (Charles was one of music's first one-hit wonders: His wax cylinder made it up to the Number One spot on 6-18-1892 and stayed there for three weeks.)
My next number turned out to be Tin Pan Alley's first blockbuster hit: "After the Ball," the Charles K. Harris tune that sold six million pieces of sheet music once it hit the streets in 1892...and became a smash recording the next year when George J. Gaskin put his lips to it (and made it Number One for ten weeks, beginning on 4-29-1893).
Those were the only tunes where I used sheet music.
The remaining eight songs in my set were all done from memory..."Golden Slippers," "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Hello, Ma Baby," "A Bird in a Gilded Cage," "The Preacher and the Bear," "Sweet Georgia Brown," and two from outside the 1890-1929 period: "Sentimental Journey" and "I Can't Stop Loving You."
Well, the crowd liked it. (Whew!)
Had to cut my set short so that Diana (a Memphis, TN native who, six weeks earlier, was one of the first finalists in the newly-created Senior Division competition at Mississippi's World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival) could make her Ragtime to Riches debut on time...4:15 PM.
Actually, Diana launched her set at 4:10 PM...when she took to the church's 2015 Yamaha grand piano.
It was great not only to see her again (first time since the 2012 OTPP Contest), but also to hear her again. The audience really enjoyed Diana's robust, powerful blend of rags, stride, boogie woogie, and blues...and she kicked it all off with two Scott Joplin numbers: "Magnetic Rag" and "Pineapple Rag." (Diana added two more of Scott's compositions later on in her thirteen-tune set: "Solace" and the one that kicked syncopation into high gear, "Maple Leaf Rag.")
Diana's versions of "Nickel in the Slot," "Singin' in the Rain," "Monkey Strut," and "Memories of You" stood out, too, as did her version of James Scott's "Climax Rag."
The community-college instructor closed out her concert with two Fats Waller tunes: The famous "Ain't Misbehavin'" and the not-as-well-known "Viper Strut."
Diana, what a debut you put on! You tore that Memorial Hall down!
At 7:00 PM, OTPP's contest coordinator kicked off this year's R to R anchor leg by firing off two medleys- one consisting of the theme songs of America's five Armed Forces branches, the other medley devoted to George M. Cohan's music.
Staying at the Yamaha grand piano, Faye changed the music to "Puttin' on the Ritz."
She likened her set to a party...and what a party it was!
To substantiate that, the Champaign, IL native went back to the medley well to join "Beer Barrel Polka" with "Too Fat Polka." And Faye showed two of ragtime's Big Three composers some love by doing James' "Frog Legs Rag" and Joseph Lamb's "Cleopatra Rag." Plus, the former University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana office manager put in old favorites like "It Had to Be You," "Mack the Knife," "Harlem Rag," and "Sailin' Away on the Henry Clay."
Faye's one of the first people to tell you that the Illinois-turned-Mississippi get-together is, at its core, a cutting contest. And as a case in point, she played her famous version of one of the rags Diana put in her own set: Luckey Roberts' "Pork and Beans."
After playing ten ditties, Faye turned it over to one of this year's C&F Junior Division finalists: Rich Bliesener, a thirteen-year-old who lives in and goes to school in Burlington, IA. (Rich's number was "Humpty Dumpty," a rag written in 1914 by Charley Straight...one of the coauthors of "Mockingbird Rag.")
Faye's fifteen-tune set ended with "Charleston Rag" and "12th Street Rag."
And then...the fun spilled over into the afterglow party, where Rich and Faye took to the two pianos.
In fact, Faye and Rich made this year's R to R afterglow the most successful one in the festival's history.
Those of you who came to R to R 14.0, well...all I can say is:
Thanks for picking this festival up off the floor...and thanks for bringing the FUN!
Sunday, July 16, 2017
It's all about the fun!
I was so afraid that nobody was going to attend the 2017 Ragtime to Riches Festival.
As things turned out, the 7-9-2017 get-together drew six paying customers to Omaha's First Central Congregational United Church of Christ (same as on 7-10-2016).
The difference was...everybody had tons of fun this year!
Faye Ballard came back for her fourth R to R experience...and this time, fellow Illinoisan Nathan Beasley came along for the ride. (He'd just gotten through conquering the Junior Division competition at the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival, the Oxford, MS event where Faye serves as contest coordinator.)
This year's activities (everything took place at First Central's Memorial Hall) got started with a bang...with Nathan and Faye kicking off the 1:00-2:00 PM open-piano session.
(In the meantime, while the twosome were working out Luckey Roberts' "Pork and Beans," I was still trying to set up chairs so that people would know that an actual festival was going to happen.)
Our first R to R patron for 2017 came in during the open-piano session...and was blown away by Nathan's playing.
Now, if another function at her church hadn't taken her away from First Central that afternoon, she would've loved the rest of the thirteenth incarnation of the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area's annual old-time piano celebration.
At 2:00 PM, this year's workshop began...and it focused on the woman who penned "I Love You Truly" and 174 other songs.
If you've forgotten about (or if you haven't heard of) Carrie Jacobs Bond, you're in a lot of company.
Bond (8-11-1862/12-28-1946) didn't even think of trying to get a career going until she was 31...when the catalyst was the drive to turn to something to support herself and her young son Fred.
Her first husband, E.J. Smith, abandoned her in 1887- after seven years of marriage. Then Carrie's next hubby, Frank Lewis Bond, died early in 1895 of an accident that a child caused by knocking Frank over and causing FLB to hit his own head on some pavement. (That child and some other kids were throwing snowballs and roughhousing in the Iron River, MI neighborhood where Carrie and Frank lived at the time.)
On top of that, Frank- a doctor by trade- was out of a job when the local mines shut down. And when that happened, CJB wanted to be the family breadwinner...but Hubby told Wifey to put that dream away. (Never mind the fact that when our twosome got hitched in 1887, Frank encouraged Carrie's songwriting efforts.)
With Frank under six feet of dirt, Carrie had to borrow some loot to move to Chicago, IL, where she rented an apartment building that served as the first music-publishing headquarters for her and Fred.
And then there were CJB's frequent bouts with rheumatism...bouts that kept her bedridden for weeks (if not months) and put her into a position where Bond's tenants ended up looking after her.
Those health issues caused her to have to sell off all her belongings until she and little Fred were down to the family piano.
Without those 88s, the two visitors one of CJB's neighbors asked her to look after one day in 1900-01 wouldn't have found- and played- "I Love You Truly."
And Carrie's career wouldn't have taken off...to the point where she not only became the first woman to make it big writing pop tunes, but also the first woman to take in a million dollars from composing ditties.
Plus: I would've had to build my 2017 R to R workshop around somebody else.
The workshop ended early (2:48 PM, Central time)...and that gave Faye plenty of time to get ready to be the first performer to give a 2017 Ragtime to Riches concert.
It was Ragtime 101 as the Champaign, IL native took to the church's 2015 Yamaha grand and launched her concert with "The Entertainer" and followed that up with Tom Turpin's "Harlem Rag," the first published rag an African-American composer ever came up with.
Next were three Ballard favorites: "Sailin' Away on the Henry Clay," "Mack the Knife," and "It Had to Be You." (Faye told the crowd that these were examples of songs ragtimers and stride pianists back in the first thirty or forty years of the 20th Century might've used in "cutting contests," where performers tried to top each other for audience applause.)
After the newly-retired office manager offered "Puttin' on the Ritz," she got back to rags...beginning with Scott Joplin's "The Cascades" and Irene Giblin's most famous number, "Chicken Chowder."
Faye's thirteen-tune set closed out with James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout" and Zez Confrey's crowd favorite, "Dizzy Fingers."
And then...seventeen-year-old Nathan came up to bat.
He nuked it on that same Yamaha grand piano.
The Eldorado, IL native had the audience going right from the start, kicking off his concert with Eubie Blake's "Charleston Rag" and Andy Razaf's and Fats Waller's "Honeysuckle Rose."
Just as Faye doubled up on Scott Joplin, Nathan did, too, offering "Maple Leaf Rag" and "Pineapple Rag..." in addition to "Swipesy," where Scott collaborated with one of his proteges, Arthur Marshall.
The Eldorado High School student added another Eubie Blake number along the way: "Fizz Water." And his superb command of the 88s continued, with tunes such as Joseph Lamb's "Bohemia," the Creamer and Layton tune "After You've Gone," Harry Belding's "Good Gravy Rag," and W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues..." the first published blues song ever composed.
Faye- one of otherwise largely self-taught Nathan's mentors- jumped in to turn "Pork and Beans" into a duet (this time, with both pianists working the Yamaha). She jumped back into the set right after his "St. Louis Blues" to team up with him on "Give My Regards to Broadway" and fellow George M. Cohan standout "You're a Grand Old Flag."
Beasley and Ballard were a hit together.
And it seemed like a great time to jump in and make it a trio.
So...I sneaked back over to the church's early-20th-Century Anderson & Newton upright (the workshop piano) and joined Nathan and Faye (both of them still at the Yamaha grand) for "Beer Barrel Polka" and "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey."
There it was...the Three B's.
Nathan consummated his conquest of R to R 2017 with his set's seventeenth tune, a standout version of "Ol' Man River."
It's up on www.youtube.com (along with some more efforts of his, Faye's, and mine)...and Nathan's version of "River" has proven highly popular. (Check it out if you haven't seen it yet!)
Well...at 7:00 PM, I ended up running the anchor leg of this year's Ragtime to Riches Festival.
And, thanks to a sore left pinky that I received a cut a couple of days earlier when I went in to rehearse at First Central Congregational, I kept threatening to drop the baton.
At first.
Even with a couple of bandages covering the cut on that left pinky, I wanted to keep in mind that I didn't want that cut to hamper the only thing I've been successfully able to copy from ragtime great Del Wood: Her sock action on the keys.
I wanted to lead the audience through a musical tour of America...but I thought I'd have time for only twelve of these fifty states.
So...I started out with a 1923 waltz from a Missourian named Charlotte Brackelsberg, "Carry Me Today, Away Back to Iowa," then went to a 1902 Paul Dresser number called "In Dear Old Illinois." (I ended up eventually jazzing up both tunes.)
Then things started to get more comfortable as my set progressed through "Back Home Again in Indiana," "Beautiful Ohio," and a 1913 Ballard MacDonald-Harry Carroll collaboration called "There's a Girl in the Heart of Maryland (with a Heart That Belongs to Me)."
Even a 1967 hit for the Bee Gees, "(The Lights Went Out in) Massachusetts," got into my set. (Well...the crowd didn't mind.)
Had fun with "Tennessee Waltz," "Mississippi Mud," "California, Here I Come," and a 1919 song written by the team of Dorothy Terriss and Ethel Bridges, "Hawaiian Lullaby."
By then, it was time to wrap things up...and I didn't want to go into overtime, knowing darned good and well it was time to "get everybody back to Nebraska."
Well, anyway...the six people who heard me play gave me the green light to perform the song I thought I'd have to cut out: "North to Alaska."
The whole thing ended with a 1915 Ray Sherwood-Bert Rule ditty called "I'm Goin' Back to Old Nebraska (Goodbye)."
Everybody DID have tons of fun at this year's R to R celebration...especially you-know-who.
Something Nathan told me just before R to R 13.0 got under way really helped: "I performed at an event where just three people showed up. And I still had a lot of fun."
Faye, Nathan, and I are coming back to First Central next July...and we hope to see you there, too!
As things turned out, the 7-9-2017 get-together drew six paying customers to Omaha's First Central Congregational United Church of Christ (same as on 7-10-2016).
The difference was...everybody had tons of fun this year!
Faye Ballard came back for her fourth R to R experience...and this time, fellow Illinoisan Nathan Beasley came along for the ride. (He'd just gotten through conquering the Junior Division competition at the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival, the Oxford, MS event where Faye serves as contest coordinator.)
This year's activities (everything took place at First Central's Memorial Hall) got started with a bang...with Nathan and Faye kicking off the 1:00-2:00 PM open-piano session.
Our first R to R patron for 2017 came in during the open-piano session...and was blown away by Nathan's playing.
Now, if another function at her church hadn't taken her away from First Central that afternoon, she would've loved the rest of the thirteenth incarnation of the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area's annual old-time piano celebration.
At 2:00 PM, this year's workshop began...and it focused on the woman who penned "I Love You Truly" and 174 other songs.
If you've forgotten about (or if you haven't heard of) Carrie Jacobs Bond, you're in a lot of company.
Bond (8-11-1862/12-28-1946) didn't even think of trying to get a career going until she was 31...when the catalyst was the drive to turn to something to support herself and her young son Fred.
Her first husband, E.J. Smith, abandoned her in 1887- after seven years of marriage. Then Carrie's next hubby, Frank Lewis Bond, died early in 1895 of an accident that a child caused by knocking Frank over and causing FLB to hit his own head on some pavement. (That child and some other kids were throwing snowballs and roughhousing in the Iron River, MI neighborhood where Carrie and Frank lived at the time.)
On top of that, Frank- a doctor by trade- was out of a job when the local mines shut down. And when that happened, CJB wanted to be the family breadwinner...but Hubby told Wifey to put that dream away. (Never mind the fact that when our twosome got hitched in 1887, Frank encouraged Carrie's songwriting efforts.)
With Frank under six feet of dirt, Carrie had to borrow some loot to move to Chicago, IL, where she rented an apartment building that served as the first music-publishing headquarters for her and Fred.
And then there were CJB's frequent bouts with rheumatism...bouts that kept her bedridden for weeks (if not months) and put her into a position where Bond's tenants ended up looking after her.
Those health issues caused her to have to sell off all her belongings until she and little Fred were down to the family piano.
Without those 88s, the two visitors one of CJB's neighbors asked her to look after one day in 1900-01 wouldn't have found- and played- "I Love You Truly."
And Carrie's career wouldn't have taken off...to the point where she not only became the first woman to make it big writing pop tunes, but also the first woman to take in a million dollars from composing ditties.
Plus: I would've had to build my 2017 R to R workshop around somebody else.
The workshop ended early (2:48 PM, Central time)...and that gave Faye plenty of time to get ready to be the first performer to give a 2017 Ragtime to Riches concert.
It was Ragtime 101 as the Champaign, IL native took to the church's 2015 Yamaha grand and launched her concert with "The Entertainer" and followed that up with Tom Turpin's "Harlem Rag," the first published rag an African-American composer ever came up with.
Next were three Ballard favorites: "Sailin' Away on the Henry Clay," "Mack the Knife," and "It Had to Be You." (Faye told the crowd that these were examples of songs ragtimers and stride pianists back in the first thirty or forty years of the 20th Century might've used in "cutting contests," where performers tried to top each other for audience applause.)
After the newly-retired office manager offered "Puttin' on the Ritz," she got back to rags...beginning with Scott Joplin's "The Cascades" and Irene Giblin's most famous number, "Chicken Chowder."
Faye's thirteen-tune set closed out with James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout" and Zez Confrey's crowd favorite, "Dizzy Fingers."
And then...seventeen-year-old Nathan came up to bat.
He nuked it on that same Yamaha grand piano.
The Eldorado, IL native had the audience going right from the start, kicking off his concert with Eubie Blake's "Charleston Rag" and Andy Razaf's and Fats Waller's "Honeysuckle Rose."
Just as Faye doubled up on Scott Joplin, Nathan did, too, offering "Maple Leaf Rag" and "Pineapple Rag..." in addition to "Swipesy," where Scott collaborated with one of his proteges, Arthur Marshall.
The Eldorado High School student added another Eubie Blake number along the way: "Fizz Water." And his superb command of the 88s continued, with tunes such as Joseph Lamb's "Bohemia," the Creamer and Layton tune "After You've Gone," Harry Belding's "Good Gravy Rag," and W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues..." the first published blues song ever composed.
Faye- one of otherwise largely self-taught Nathan's mentors- jumped in to turn "Pork and Beans" into a duet (this time, with both pianists working the Yamaha). She jumped back into the set right after his "St. Louis Blues" to team up with him on "Give My Regards to Broadway" and fellow George M. Cohan standout "You're a Grand Old Flag."
Beasley and Ballard were a hit together.
And it seemed like a great time to jump in and make it a trio.
So...I sneaked back over to the church's early-20th-Century Anderson & Newton upright (the workshop piano) and joined Nathan and Faye (both of them still at the Yamaha grand) for "Beer Barrel Polka" and "Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey."
There it was...the Three B's.
Nathan consummated his conquest of R to R 2017 with his set's seventeenth tune, a standout version of "Ol' Man River."
It's up on www.youtube.com (along with some more efforts of his, Faye's, and mine)...and Nathan's version of "River" has proven highly popular. (Check it out if you haven't seen it yet!)
Well...at 7:00 PM, I ended up running the anchor leg of this year's Ragtime to Riches Festival.
And, thanks to a sore left pinky that I received a cut a couple of days earlier when I went in to rehearse at First Central Congregational, I kept threatening to drop the baton.
At first.
Even with a couple of bandages covering the cut on that left pinky, I wanted to keep in mind that I didn't want that cut to hamper the only thing I've been successfully able to copy from ragtime great Del Wood: Her sock action on the keys.
I wanted to lead the audience through a musical tour of America...but I thought I'd have time for only twelve of these fifty states.
So...I started out with a 1923 waltz from a Missourian named Charlotte Brackelsberg, "Carry Me Today, Away Back to Iowa," then went to a 1902 Paul Dresser number called "In Dear Old Illinois." (I ended up eventually jazzing up both tunes.)
Then things started to get more comfortable as my set progressed through "Back Home Again in Indiana," "Beautiful Ohio," and a 1913 Ballard MacDonald-Harry Carroll collaboration called "There's a Girl in the Heart of Maryland (with a Heart That Belongs to Me)."
Even a 1967 hit for the Bee Gees, "(The Lights Went Out in) Massachusetts," got into my set. (Well...the crowd didn't mind.)
Had fun with "Tennessee Waltz," "Mississippi Mud," "California, Here I Come," and a 1919 song written by the team of Dorothy Terriss and Ethel Bridges, "Hawaiian Lullaby."
By then, it was time to wrap things up...and I didn't want to go into overtime, knowing darned good and well it was time to "get everybody back to Nebraska."
Well, anyway...the six people who heard me play gave me the green light to perform the song I thought I'd have to cut out: "North to Alaska."
The whole thing ended with a 1915 Ray Sherwood-Bert Rule ditty called "I'm Goin' Back to Old Nebraska (Goodbye)."
Everybody DID have tons of fun at this year's R to R celebration...especially you-know-who.
Something Nathan told me just before R to R 13.0 got under way really helped: "I performed at an event where just three people showed up. And I still had a lot of fun."
Faye, Nathan, and I are coming back to First Central next July...and we hope to see you there, too!
Saturday, July 16, 2016
I've Got Some Really Good News and Some Very Bad News
First, the very bad news:
Only six tickets were sold for this year's Ragtime to Riches Festival, held at Omaha's First Central Congregational United Church of Christ. (Last year, the Great Plains Ragtime Society sold thirteen ducats.)
Now here's the really good news:
All the attendees really enjoyed themselves at this past Sunday's event.
Admittedly, 7-10-2016 was a scorcher here in the River City. (7-12-2015- the day of the previous R to R Festival- turned out to be hot outside here in Nebraska's largest city, too.)
Well, some things were different about the twelfth R to R. One of the differences was...a new workshop presenter.
2016 represented Faye Ballard's first year of giving a Ragtime to Riches workshop. This year's topic was one that one of the 2006 performers, Nan Bostick (one of the best ragtime historians who ever lived), touched on: "Women in Ragtime."
And like Nan's presentation from a decade ago, Faye's presentation hit the spot.
The Champaign, IL native presented a dozen rags by women composers. (Did you know that at least 500 women wrote one rag or more apiece during the 1899-1917 period?)
For me, some of the standouts in Faye's workshop were "The Allen Glide," written by Louise Allen in 1915; "Chicken Chowder," penned a decade earlier by a St. Louis teenager named Irene Giblin; Adeline Shepard's rousing "Pickles and Peppers;" "The Thriller," a 1909 May Aufderheide rag; and a 1907 number, Julia Lee Niebergall's "Hoosier Rag."
When it came time to change from workshop presenter to concert performer, Faye switched the focus to some of ragtime's men composers. First up was "The Harlem Rag," the Tom Turpin piece that was the first published rag written by an African-American composer; then 1899's "Original Rags," the first of five Scott Joplin numbers the recently-retired office manager from Central Illinois played at this year's R to R.
Faye didn't leave the other two members of ragtime's Big Three behind; she turned in James Scott's "Frog Legs Rag" and Joseph Lamb's "Ragtime Nightingale."
Then she gave two examples of what rag pianists would play in the "cutting contests" of that 1899-1917 period: "It Had to Be You" and "Mack the Knife," both of which actually were written in the 1920s...long after the Ragtime Era ended.
Faye wrapped it all up by coming up with a fine, fine version of "Twelfth Street Rag."
I was scheduled to go up at 4:15 PM (Central time)...but I ended up deciding to start my own concert at 4:30 PM after helping Marty Mincer get set up for the anchor leg of R to R 2016. (We'll take a look at the anchor leg later!)
Actually...my turn at bat had a head start, preceding the workshop by ten minutes, the better to help out a festival fan who needed to attend her oldest grandson's birthday party.
So I wrapped up the festival's open-piano session with my first two concert selections: "In the Good Old Summertime" and "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans."
Once the clock ticked 4:30 PM, I picked my own concert thread back up and continued to focus on tunes I'd done in competition at the event Faye serves as its coordinator: The World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival.
Mindful of the fact that the Illinois-turned-Mississippi competition started out as a fundraiser for the Monticello (IL) Railway Museum, and thinking about how contestants initially had to choose a rail-related song among their selections, I offered up "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad..." one of just two numbers I'd been able to play as a finalist (the year was 1994).
In addition, George Giefer's 1899 winner "Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy's Chowder?" worked out fine (well, at least the audience thought so); so did my closer, "In My Merry Oldsmobile."
This concert included three rags: Charles Hunter's 1899 "Tickled to Death," W.C. Polla's 1904 "Funny Folks," and E. Warren Furry's only rag of consequence, his 1902 "Robardina Rag."
And this machine operator from here in Omaha (by way of Des Moines, IA) called an audible, replacing would-be selection "Grand March (from 'Aida')" with "Take Your Girlie to the Movies (If You Can't Make Love at Home)."
Speaking of movies...the R to R anchor leg was a movie.
For the first time in R to R history, we'd show a silent film. In this case, it was Harold Lloyd's 1920 winner "Get Out and Get Under."
And instead of giving a conventional concert, Marty was in town to cue the movie.
With Marty (the apple farmer from Hamburg, IA) providing the DVD, some friends from the church I go to providing a DVD projector, and First Central itself coming up with a DVD player, we were ready to go.
We didn't even need a screen.
The DVD projector went on top of the church's turn-of-the-20th-Century Anderson & Newton upright piano and was aimed at one of the blank walls at the church's Memorial Hall.
That setup worked out fine.
Marty's accompaniment (on the church's turn-of-the-21st-Century Yamaha grand piano) was right on. (He even threw some post-1920 wrinkles in there, and also pulled out a song from 1962- "Puff, the Magic Dragon-" during a scene where Harold was lighting up a cigarette.)
"Get Out and Get Under" was some kind of hilarious.
Now if we'd been able to get more people to come to First Central this past Sunday.
I'm thinking of some projects that can get more people (especially people here in the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area) to check out the R to R Festival...and help keep old-time piano alive.
If you've got any suggestions, feel free to pass them along. (Nope...giving up isn't an option!)
It's time for some really good news and some very GOOD news.
Only six tickets were sold for this year's Ragtime to Riches Festival, held at Omaha's First Central Congregational United Church of Christ. (Last year, the Great Plains Ragtime Society sold thirteen ducats.)
Now here's the really good news:
All the attendees really enjoyed themselves at this past Sunday's event.
Admittedly, 7-10-2016 was a scorcher here in the River City. (7-12-2015- the day of the previous R to R Festival- turned out to be hot outside here in Nebraska's largest city, too.)
Well, some things were different about the twelfth R to R. One of the differences was...a new workshop presenter.
2016 represented Faye Ballard's first year of giving a Ragtime to Riches workshop. This year's topic was one that one of the 2006 performers, Nan Bostick (one of the best ragtime historians who ever lived), touched on: "Women in Ragtime."
And like Nan's presentation from a decade ago, Faye's presentation hit the spot.
The Champaign, IL native presented a dozen rags by women composers. (Did you know that at least 500 women wrote one rag or more apiece during the 1899-1917 period?)
For me, some of the standouts in Faye's workshop were "The Allen Glide," written by Louise Allen in 1915; "Chicken Chowder," penned a decade earlier by a St. Louis teenager named Irene Giblin; Adeline Shepard's rousing "Pickles and Peppers;" "The Thriller," a 1909 May Aufderheide rag; and a 1907 number, Julia Lee Niebergall's "Hoosier Rag."
When it came time to change from workshop presenter to concert performer, Faye switched the focus to some of ragtime's men composers. First up was "The Harlem Rag," the Tom Turpin piece that was the first published rag written by an African-American composer; then 1899's "Original Rags," the first of five Scott Joplin numbers the recently-retired office manager from Central Illinois played at this year's R to R.
Faye didn't leave the other two members of ragtime's Big Three behind; she turned in James Scott's "Frog Legs Rag" and Joseph Lamb's "Ragtime Nightingale."
Then she gave two examples of what rag pianists would play in the "cutting contests" of that 1899-1917 period: "It Had to Be You" and "Mack the Knife," both of which actually were written in the 1920s...long after the Ragtime Era ended.
Faye wrapped it all up by coming up with a fine, fine version of "Twelfth Street Rag."
I was scheduled to go up at 4:15 PM (Central time)...but I ended up deciding to start my own concert at 4:30 PM after helping Marty Mincer get set up for the anchor leg of R to R 2016. (We'll take a look at the anchor leg later!)
Actually...my turn at bat had a head start, preceding the workshop by ten minutes, the better to help out a festival fan who needed to attend her oldest grandson's birthday party.
So I wrapped up the festival's open-piano session with my first two concert selections: "In the Good Old Summertime" and "Way Down Yonder in New Orleans."
Once the clock ticked 4:30 PM, I picked my own concert thread back up and continued to focus on tunes I'd done in competition at the event Faye serves as its coordinator: The World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival.
Mindful of the fact that the Illinois-turned-Mississippi competition started out as a fundraiser for the Monticello (IL) Railway Museum, and thinking about how contestants initially had to choose a rail-related song among their selections, I offered up "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad..." one of just two numbers I'd been able to play as a finalist (the year was 1994).
In addition, George Giefer's 1899 winner "Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy's Chowder?" worked out fine (well, at least the audience thought so); so did my closer, "In My Merry Oldsmobile."
This concert included three rags: Charles Hunter's 1899 "Tickled to Death," W.C. Polla's 1904 "Funny Folks," and E. Warren Furry's only rag of consequence, his 1902 "Robardina Rag."
And this machine operator from here in Omaha (by way of Des Moines, IA) called an audible, replacing would-be selection "Grand March (from 'Aida')" with "Take Your Girlie to the Movies (If You Can't Make Love at Home)."
Speaking of movies...the R to R anchor leg was a movie.
For the first time in R to R history, we'd show a silent film. In this case, it was Harold Lloyd's 1920 winner "Get Out and Get Under."
And instead of giving a conventional concert, Marty was in town to cue the movie.
With Marty (the apple farmer from Hamburg, IA) providing the DVD, some friends from the church I go to providing a DVD projector, and First Central itself coming up with a DVD player, we were ready to go.
We didn't even need a screen.
The DVD projector went on top of the church's turn-of-the-20th-Century Anderson & Newton upright piano and was aimed at one of the blank walls at the church's Memorial Hall.
That setup worked out fine.
Marty's accompaniment (on the church's turn-of-the-21st-Century Yamaha grand piano) was right on. (He even threw some post-1920 wrinkles in there, and also pulled out a song from 1962- "Puff, the Magic Dragon-" during a scene where Harold was lighting up a cigarette.)
"Get Out and Get Under" was some kind of hilarious.
Now if we'd been able to get more people to come to First Central this past Sunday.
I'm thinking of some projects that can get more people (especially people here in the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area) to check out the R to R Festival...and help keep old-time piano alive.
If you've got any suggestions, feel free to pass them along. (Nope...giving up isn't an option!)
It's time for some really good news and some very GOOD news.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Goodbye, Decatur
Things were starting to look up for the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival- at least from a competition standpoint- as a new century arose. The contest was now firmly established as a Decatur, IL attraction, what with the perfect location (the newly-renamed Holiday Inn Select)...a venue where ragtime fans no longer had to worry about it raining on the parade.
What could go wrong?
We'll tell you later.
But first...let's talk about the 2000 version.
That year, 23 contestants weighed in (14 in the Regular Division, nine in the Junior Division); while eight JDs were trying to wrestle the division's crown away from the new kingpin, Adam Yarian, everybody in the RD group fought to get the newly-vacated title...left open because the then rules said that Brian Holland couldn't go after a fourth straight championship.
Two Reg Division contestants had never tasted the OTPP experience before: Barbara Curry and Michael Urban-Piette.
Meanwhile, John McElhaney ended a sixteen-year wait between berths in the contest (an event that underwent all sorts of changes since he last tried it in 1984...the biggest being the competition's move indoors in 1987).
One thing hadn't changed for Johnny Mac: He proved he was still RD semifinals material.
In the JD competition, Jerry Ailshie, Erin Long, and Ashley Leverenz were back to tussle with Adam Y. and Harrison Wade. But for 2000, they were joined by first-timers Will Best, Charles and Chris Korban, and the newest Danville (IL) discovery, Lauren Clayton.
When all was said and done, Harrison passed up Jerry (and Charles turned out to be the better Korban)...but Adam from Maryland was able to notch a third straight Junior Division championship.
Fourteen-year-old Adam did it...he punched his ticket into the contest's adult division.
Back in the adult-division wars, Mimi Blais was determined to leave no doubt that 2000 was her year...no questions asked.
The question was: "Who's gonna place second?"
At first, Michael Stalcup was running second...but he flamed out in the semifinals, and fell so far behind that Dan Mouyard, Marty Mincer, and Faye Ballard passed him up (with Faye taking second for herself at the end of the RD second round).
Well...if 2000 wasn't going to Mimi's year, would it be Faye's? (After all, when OTPP was still a one-division competition, Faye nearly ripped the crown away from Joybelle Squibb in 1976, the contest's second year.)
As it all turned out, Dan and the Two Martys (Mincer and Sammon) passed Faye up...but all four of 'em couldn't come out ahead of Mimi. (Marty S. placed second in the Regs.)
It all came down to dueling versions of "Kitten on the Keys:" Mimi's version was better than the rendition Marty M. brought home.
And no woman contestant has since snared the Regular Division's top prize.
Circumstances prevented Mimi from coming back to Decatur for the 2001 C&F...so that meant both division titles were there for the taking.
2001 was the year the Memorial Day weekend extravaganza boasted 24 contestants (sixteen RDs and eight JDs); seven pianists were new to the contest this time...and all but two were Regular Division performers.
David Feurzeig and Janet Bullock were two of 2001's first-timers; so were Al Roma (an American living in Germany at the time) and Andrew Barker (a Briton living in America back then).
Lauren's piano teacher, Bev Wolf, filled out an entry blank, too.
Bev was the instructor who also showed Ashley and Erin- as well as 1999 JD performer Marcie Hunt- the ropes.
Speaking of JD...it was a one-Korban year (Charles carried the family banner this time) and the first year Illinoisan Karah Gettleman and Iowan Sarah Davison (who grew up to become a Tennessean and help start a great band called High Road III) got in there.
I first met Sarah two years earlier, when I competed at the National Old-Time Country, Bluegrass, and Folk Music Festival and Contest (still held at that time in Avoca, IA). In 1999, the then sixteen-year-old grabbed that festival's ragtime piano championship...a title I'm told I almost won on my own first try.
Getting back to 2001...it looked as if Al was going to triumph on his first try. He boasted a four-point preliminary lead over David and the youngest of the RD performers, ol' Adam Y. But Adam Y. and Al R. lost ground in the division semifinals, and Dan went from a fourth-place tie with Faye to a second-place tie with Al...while David F. scooted to the top coming into the Reg finals.
OTPP Weekend 2001 turned out to have quite a few firsts:
*Harrison emerged victorious (his initial title) in the younger competition...in a year where the second-place and third-place JD finishers finally got awarded prize money, too.
*Sarah became the first female Junior Division contestant to receive prize money (she finished third while Will got second place).
*David couldn't hang on to the top Regular Division spot...and, instead,
Dan M. became the first OTPP contestant to follow up a JD title with a championship in the RDs. (Adam, Al, and Faye rounded out the RD Top Five.)
2001 was also the year Decatur's Holiday Inn Select went under new management.
This new management group decided to remodel the hotel...lobby, rooms, and all. And the danger was that the makeover wouldn't be done in time for 2002's Memorial Day weekend.
Plus, the group's members felt the Holiday Inn Select had room for just one big musical event per year. As a result, the new team decided to prop up the Central Illinois Jazz Festival and turn its back on the OTPP Contest.
The clincher came from the Decatur Convention and Visitors Bureau, a group that had been giving the Old-Time Music Preservation Association $2,000 per year to help with advertising the contest.
On the eve of the 2001 get-together, bureau officials told OMPA: "We're cutting you off!"
And so, for the first time in fifteen years, Ted Lemen and Co. needed a place for contestants to show their stuff on the 1883 Weber upright piano nicknamed "Moby Dink."
When we come back to take another look at the history of the OTPP soiree, we'll learn about the contest's next site.
I'm Jim Boston...thanks for reading this blog!
What could go wrong?
We'll tell you later.
But first...let's talk about the 2000 version.
That year, 23 contestants weighed in (14 in the Regular Division, nine in the Junior Division); while eight JDs were trying to wrestle the division's crown away from the new kingpin, Adam Yarian, everybody in the RD group fought to get the newly-vacated title...left open because the then rules said that Brian Holland couldn't go after a fourth straight championship.
Two Reg Division contestants had never tasted the OTPP experience before: Barbara Curry and Michael Urban-Piette.
Meanwhile, John McElhaney ended a sixteen-year wait between berths in the contest (an event that underwent all sorts of changes since he last tried it in 1984...the biggest being the competition's move indoors in 1987).
One thing hadn't changed for Johnny Mac: He proved he was still RD semifinals material.
In the JD competition, Jerry Ailshie, Erin Long, and Ashley Leverenz were back to tussle with Adam Y. and Harrison Wade. But for 2000, they were joined by first-timers Will Best, Charles and Chris Korban, and the newest Danville (IL) discovery, Lauren Clayton.
When all was said and done, Harrison passed up Jerry (and Charles turned out to be the better Korban)...but Adam from Maryland was able to notch a third straight Junior Division championship.
Fourteen-year-old Adam did it...he punched his ticket into the contest's adult division.
Back in the adult-division wars, Mimi Blais was determined to leave no doubt that 2000 was her year...no questions asked.
The question was: "Who's gonna place second?"
At first, Michael Stalcup was running second...but he flamed out in the semifinals, and fell so far behind that Dan Mouyard, Marty Mincer, and Faye Ballard passed him up (with Faye taking second for herself at the end of the RD second round).
Well...if 2000 wasn't going to Mimi's year, would it be Faye's? (After all, when OTPP was still a one-division competition, Faye nearly ripped the crown away from Joybelle Squibb in 1976, the contest's second year.)
As it all turned out, Dan and the Two Martys (Mincer and Sammon) passed Faye up...but all four of 'em couldn't come out ahead of Mimi. (Marty S. placed second in the Regs.)
It all came down to dueling versions of "Kitten on the Keys:" Mimi's version was better than the rendition Marty M. brought home.
And no woman contestant has since snared the Regular Division's top prize.
Circumstances prevented Mimi from coming back to Decatur for the 2001 C&F...so that meant both division titles were there for the taking.
2001 was the year the Memorial Day weekend extravaganza boasted 24 contestants (sixteen RDs and eight JDs); seven pianists were new to the contest this time...and all but two were Regular Division performers.
David Feurzeig and Janet Bullock were two of 2001's first-timers; so were Al Roma (an American living in Germany at the time) and Andrew Barker (a Briton living in America back then).
Lauren's piano teacher, Bev Wolf, filled out an entry blank, too.
Speaking of JD...it was a one-Korban year (Charles carried the family banner this time) and the first year Illinoisan Karah Gettleman and Iowan Sarah Davison (who grew up to become a Tennessean and help start a great band called High Road III) got in there.
I first met Sarah two years earlier, when I competed at the National Old-Time Country, Bluegrass, and Folk Music Festival and Contest (still held at that time in Avoca, IA). In 1999, the then sixteen-year-old grabbed that festival's ragtime piano championship...a title I'm told I almost won on my own first try.
Getting back to 2001...it looked as if Al was going to triumph on his first try. He boasted a four-point preliminary lead over David and the youngest of the RD performers, ol' Adam Y. But Adam Y. and Al R. lost ground in the division semifinals, and Dan went from a fourth-place tie with Faye to a second-place tie with Al...while David F. scooted to the top coming into the Reg finals.
OTPP Weekend 2001 turned out to have quite a few firsts:
*Harrison emerged victorious (his initial title) in the younger competition...in a year where the second-place and third-place JD finishers finally got awarded prize money, too.
*Sarah became the first female Junior Division contestant to receive prize money (she finished third while Will got second place).
*David couldn't hang on to the top Regular Division spot...and, instead,
2001 was also the year Decatur's Holiday Inn Select went under new management.
This new management group decided to remodel the hotel...lobby, rooms, and all. And the danger was that the makeover wouldn't be done in time for 2002's Memorial Day weekend.
Plus, the group's members felt the Holiday Inn Select had room for just one big musical event per year. As a result, the new team decided to prop up the Central Illinois Jazz Festival and turn its back on the OTPP Contest.
The clincher came from the Decatur Convention and Visitors Bureau, a group that had been giving the Old-Time Music Preservation Association $2,000 per year to help with advertising the contest.
On the eve of the 2001 get-together, bureau officials told OMPA: "We're cutting you off!"
And so, for the first time in fifteen years, Ted Lemen and Co. needed a place for contestants to show their stuff on the 1883 Weber upright piano nicknamed "Moby Dink."
When we come back to take another look at the history of the OTPP soiree, we'll learn about the contest's next site.
I'm Jim Boston...thanks for reading this blog!
Saturday, April 30, 2016
32 Contestants!
It's getting to be that time again...when ragtime musicians and their supporters gear up for the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival. And this year, the plot thickens.
The reason: After four decades of the event taking place in (as things turned out) four cities in Illinois (Monticello, Decatur, Peoria, and East Peoria), old-time piano's biggest competition (well, at least on American soil) begins a new chapter...on and around the campus of the University of Mississippi. This year's dates: 5-26/30-2016.
I won't get to go to Oxford, MS this time around. And the culprit is the cataract in my left eye. (It's going to have to be removed later this year or early in 2017, depending on when or if I'm able to receive a bonus from the plastics factory that currently employs me. And the eye-care clinic performing the surgery wants $1,500 up front- and the retina surgery I underwent on 12-14-2015 completely paid up- before an ophthalmologist can touch my left eyeball again.)
You bet I've got health insurance through my place of work.
It's just that, with its $1,500 deductible, the insurance is worthless when the staff at the eye clinic you trade with tells you: "We're going to have to shoot a laser into your eye."
Result: I've decided to retire from OTPP competition and focus on performing here in the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area.
I came back to this area on 3-29-1997, and as a result, I couldn't make the trip to Decatur that Memorial Day weekend (hadn't racked enough vacation time at my then-new gig as a data storage technician for an infotech firm).
So...I made gearing up for OTPP '98 one of my goals.
The 1997 Decatur experience featured an eighteen-player field (fourteen in the Regular Division and four in the Junior Division) in which Brian Holland grabbed the Traveling Trophy for the first time...and Noah Harmon beat out Mindy Dunkle on technical points for the JD title.
The next year, Noah, Mindy, and their fellow 1997 JD competitors John Clark and Neil Blaze had to fight off seven new younger contestants: Kara Huber, Peter Segrist, Joe King, Katrina Kappes, Noah's younger brother Zack, and two names we'd hear from during the decade to come: An Illinoisan named Harrison Wade and a 12-year-old Marylander named Adam Yarian.
Meanwhile, the adult field saw a 50% increase in size over its 1997 counterpart. First of all, Patrick Kelly, Theresa Milhoan, Bruce Walker, a Tennessean named Michael Stalcup, and a Kentuckian by the name of Allen Dale (maybe you've seen Allen's YouTube offerings) entered the OTPP wars for the first time. And then Mimi Blais, Will Hahn, and I came back after a year's absence. (Gale Foehner, Arlene Stoller, and defending RD finalists Adam Downey and Steve Kummer were no-shows this time around.)
To top it all off, Floridian Dorothy Baldwin came back to C&F competition after a nine-year gulf...while Noah's and Zack's dad (and Linda's hubby) John ended an eleven-year sabbatical from going after the Big Loot.
Not since the Kaizers in the middle 1980s had a whole family tried to grab the top OTPP prizes. As it all shook out in '98 for the Harmons of Winneconne, WI, it was Mother and Oldest Son Know Best. (Noah lost his Junior Division crown...but he still outplayed Zack. What's more, Linda snared a place in the Reg Top Ten...leaving John behind.)
With Mimi back to perform her brand of sorcery on the contest piano ("Moby Dink," a Weber upright built in 1883), she and Brian made it a two-person RD race. And Theresa (a teacher from Illinois) initially looked like a Top Five pianist.
As Theresa flamed out in the Reg Division semifinals, Mimi broke a preliminary-round tie between herself and Brian to take a one-point semifinal lead...that evaporated when Brian aced his RD finals test, thanks to killer versions of "I've Found a New Baby" and "Handful of Keys." The Man from Indiana stood tallest again, while Mimi, Marty Mincer, John Skaggs, and Bill Edwards rounded out the division's money winners.
The biggest news in Decatur that May came in the JDs. Neil was hoping 1998 would be his year...but it actually was the year old-time piano fans found out about Adam Yarian's greatness.
A new force had emerged.
Instead of 32 pianists (the record-setting 1998 total; the old mark was 31 in 1984) duking it out, 25 showed up in the Holiday Inn Select's green room on 5-29-1999. Of the previous year's newcomers in the RDs, only Michael and Bruce came back for 1999 in their quest to prevent Brian from becoming the fourth pianist to get three straight Reg championships. In addition, only one newcomer enlisted in that division: Tom Cortese. And Marty Sammon (the JD champ in 1994 and 1995) made it into the ranks of the RDs this time around- his first contact with OTPP pressure in four years.
By contrast, the Danville Connection made its debut in the Junior Division bracket.
"The Danville What?" Well, a Danville, IL pianist and teacher named Bev Wolf started getting some of her students into OTPP; the first ones were 1999 combatants Ashley Leverenz, Erin Long, and Marcie Hunt.
Fellow Illinoisans Jerry Ailshie and Amanda Benoit joined Marcie, Ashley, and Erin as contest newcomers in the JDs for the last (or next-to-last, depending on your point of view) year of the 20th Century.
Jerry outpointed all the other newcomers (Tom included!), but it just wasn't enough to keep Adam Y. out of the driver's seat in the younger division.
Meanwhile, the 1999 Regular Division race was looking like the one from the year before...except that Mimi was clearly ahead of Brian during the first two rounds. (There'd be no stopping her this time, and she'd bring the $1,200 top prize back to Montreal, QC.)
"Oh, yeah?" said Brian.
With another nearly flawless final round (it included "Dallas Blues" and Scott Joplin's "New Era Rag"), Brian put his name next to those of Dorothy Herrold, Mark Haldorson, and Ron Trotta.
He closed out an era and became, at 27, the youngest three-time undefeated RD champ ever.
And so, the next question became: "With Brian Holland retiring unbeaten, who's gonna rule the Regular Division now?"
Stay with us and we'll find out.
The reason: After four decades of the event taking place in (as things turned out) four cities in Illinois (Monticello, Decatur, Peoria, and East Peoria), old-time piano's biggest competition (well, at least on American soil) begins a new chapter...on and around the campus of the University of Mississippi. This year's dates: 5-26/30-2016.
I won't get to go to Oxford, MS this time around. And the culprit is the cataract in my left eye. (It's going to have to be removed later this year or early in 2017, depending on when or if I'm able to receive a bonus from the plastics factory that currently employs me. And the eye-care clinic performing the surgery wants $1,500 up front- and the retina surgery I underwent on 12-14-2015 completely paid up- before an ophthalmologist can touch my left eyeball again.)
You bet I've got health insurance through my place of work.
It's just that, with its $1,500 deductible, the insurance is worthless when the staff at the eye clinic you trade with tells you: "We're going to have to shoot a laser into your eye."
Result: I've decided to retire from OTPP competition and focus on performing here in the Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue area.
I came back to this area on 3-29-1997, and as a result, I couldn't make the trip to Decatur that Memorial Day weekend (hadn't racked enough vacation time at my then-new gig as a data storage technician for an infotech firm).
So...I made gearing up for OTPP '98 one of my goals.
The 1997 Decatur experience featured an eighteen-player field (fourteen in the Regular Division and four in the Junior Division) in which Brian Holland grabbed the Traveling Trophy for the first time...and Noah Harmon beat out Mindy Dunkle on technical points for the JD title.
The next year, Noah, Mindy, and their fellow 1997 JD competitors John Clark and Neil Blaze had to fight off seven new younger contestants: Kara Huber, Peter Segrist, Joe King, Katrina Kappes, Noah's younger brother Zack, and two names we'd hear from during the decade to come: An Illinoisan named Harrison Wade and a 12-year-old Marylander named Adam Yarian.
Meanwhile, the adult field saw a 50% increase in size over its 1997 counterpart. First of all, Patrick Kelly, Theresa Milhoan, Bruce Walker, a Tennessean named Michael Stalcup, and a Kentuckian by the name of Allen Dale (maybe you've seen Allen's YouTube offerings) entered the OTPP wars for the first time. And then Mimi Blais, Will Hahn, and I came back after a year's absence. (Gale Foehner, Arlene Stoller, and defending RD finalists Adam Downey and Steve Kummer were no-shows this time around.)
To top it all off, Floridian Dorothy Baldwin came back to C&F competition after a nine-year gulf...while Noah's and Zack's dad (and Linda's hubby) John ended an eleven-year sabbatical from going after the Big Loot.
Not since the Kaizers in the middle 1980s had a whole family tried to grab the top OTPP prizes. As it all shook out in '98 for the Harmons of Winneconne, WI, it was Mother and Oldest Son Know Best. (Noah lost his Junior Division crown...but he still outplayed Zack. What's more, Linda snared a place in the Reg Top Ten...leaving John behind.)
With Mimi back to perform her brand of sorcery on the contest piano ("Moby Dink," a Weber upright built in 1883), she and Brian made it a two-person RD race. And Theresa (a teacher from Illinois) initially looked like a Top Five pianist.
As Theresa flamed out in the Reg Division semifinals, Mimi broke a preliminary-round tie between herself and Brian to take a one-point semifinal lead...that evaporated when Brian aced his RD finals test, thanks to killer versions of "I've Found a New Baby" and "Handful of Keys." The Man from Indiana stood tallest again, while Mimi, Marty Mincer, John Skaggs, and Bill Edwards rounded out the division's money winners.
The biggest news in Decatur that May came in the JDs. Neil was hoping 1998 would be his year...but it actually was the year old-time piano fans found out about Adam Yarian's greatness.
A new force had emerged.
Instead of 32 pianists (the record-setting 1998 total; the old mark was 31 in 1984) duking it out, 25 showed up in the Holiday Inn Select's green room on 5-29-1999. Of the previous year's newcomers in the RDs, only Michael and Bruce came back for 1999 in their quest to prevent Brian from becoming the fourth pianist to get three straight Reg championships. In addition, only one newcomer enlisted in that division: Tom Cortese. And Marty Sammon (the JD champ in 1994 and 1995) made it into the ranks of the RDs this time around- his first contact with OTPP pressure in four years.
By contrast, the Danville Connection made its debut in the Junior Division bracket.
"The Danville What?" Well, a Danville, IL pianist and teacher named Bev Wolf started getting some of her students into OTPP; the first ones were 1999 combatants Ashley Leverenz, Erin Long, and Marcie Hunt.
Fellow Illinoisans Jerry Ailshie and Amanda Benoit joined Marcie, Ashley, and Erin as contest newcomers in the JDs for the last (or next-to-last, depending on your point of view) year of the 20th Century.
Jerry outpointed all the other newcomers (Tom included!), but it just wasn't enough to keep Adam Y. out of the driver's seat in the younger division.
Meanwhile, the 1999 Regular Division race was looking like the one from the year before...except that Mimi was clearly ahead of Brian during the first two rounds. (There'd be no stopping her this time, and she'd bring the $1,200 top prize back to Montreal, QC.)
"Oh, yeah?" said Brian.
With another nearly flawless final round (it included "Dallas Blues" and Scott Joplin's "New Era Rag"), Brian put his name next to those of Dorothy Herrold, Mark Haldorson, and Ron Trotta.
He closed out an era and became, at 27, the youngest three-time undefeated RD champ ever.
And so, the next question became: "With Brian Holland retiring unbeaten, who's gonna rule the Regular Division now?"
Stay with us and we'll find out.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
"You Mean There's Still a Contest?"
Glad to be back!
Now that it's official that the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival will take place in a new location (Oxford, MS) and will continue to happen on Memorial Day weekend, it sounded like a great, great time to pick the contest's history back up.
Where we left off, it was 1994...and Mimi Blais came to the Holiday Inn Conference Hotel in Decatur, IL (the OTPP site since 1987) and tore the place up as she snared the Regular Division's Traveling Trophy and took it back home to Montreal, QC.
And it was a year where only five Regular Division contestants and just five Junior Division ones went after prize money.
When Mimi won it all in the RDs, that did it.
Put the brakes on the shrinking of the contestant field, that is.
When we met at Decatur's Holiday Inn in 1995, six Junior Division hopefuls and eighteen Reg Division contestants took to the stage...including four RDs who decided not to go after the Big Dough the year before (after competing in 1993) and six newcomers to the division.
In addition, three of the JDs had never competed in OTPP before. In that group, there were John Schultz and two names we'd hear from for a long time to come: Noah Harmon (a son of Linda and John) and Dan Mouyard.
Newcomers to the Regular Division were Teresa Arth, Clarence Maley, Mitchell Johnson, Rod Ludwig, Howie Wyeth (a descendant of Andrew), and John Yates. (John Y., from Bowmanville, ON, teamed up with Mimi to give the contest two Canadians that year.) What's more, Brian Holland, Marty Mincer, Faye Ballard, and "Perfessor" Bill Edwards got back into the mix after a two-year absence, Todd Robbins took up the call after staying away for seven years...and John H. ended an eight-year siesta from competition, while Linda moved out from behind the judges' table to climb back on stage, end a six-year hiatus from competing, and take on the contest piano, that 1883 Weber upright nicknamed "Moby Dink."
And the biggest news of all was...Julie McClarey, six years after winning it all in the RDs, jumped back in.
It was all because of the giant competitive shadow Mimi cast.
For the first two rounds of Reg competition, it looked as if Mimi was going to keep that trophy, in spite of Julie and Linda (and those two inseparables, Marty M. and "Perfessor" Bill) tagging after her.
Still, Julie's sets got stronger with each round...until her textbook technique (standing out in "Grandpa's Spell" and "Alabamy Bound") enabled the Mom from Decatur to snatch the Traveling Trophy away from the classically-trained Montrealer.
By three points.
Meanwhile, Marty Sammon (that's right, blues fans; that Marty Sammon) showed that he wasn't going to let go of the Junior Division crown...which, this time around, he won by eight points over Max Schiltz.
Just as Mimi heard Julie's footsteps in 1995, Julie heard footsteps herself the next year...a year in which seven pianists (all but one duking it out in the RDs) tried OTPP competition for the first time.
That meant new RD'ers Gale Foehner, Will Hahn, T.J. Thompson, Brad Pregeant, John Skaggs, and an Irishman named Desmond Crawford.
The lone new JD'er, Illinoisan Hillary Fedirka, joined Max from Missouri in trying to get the title Marty S. wasn't able to fight to keep in 1996 (circumstances kept him from making the trip from the Chicago suburbs to Decatur that Memorial Day weekend).
It was almost Max' year.
Instead, 1996 was Pennsylvania Dan's year.
By three points.
Over in the Regs, Brian went from knocking on the door to the division's Top Five to kicking it down. He and John Skaggs ended up replacing Bill E. and Marty M. as the two men in the Regular Division's money line...and Faye wound up taking Linda's place in the RD Top Five. (Linda, Marty M., and Bill E. didn't taste it up in 1996.)
Julie Mac heard footsteps, all right...but she still outplayed Brian and kept her place at the top of the Regular Division. Brian, meanwhile, passed up Mimi and relegated her to third place (with Faye and John Skaggs rounding out the quintet).
But the Man from Indiana served notice...and the next three OTPP Contests would belong to him. (Well, at least the adult competition would belong to him.)
I didn't get to see Brian Holland snag his first RD crown. I'd moved from Sioux City, IA back here to Omaha, NE on 3-29-1997...and I hadn't yet earned enough vacation time at my new job (with an information technology company) to make the trip back to Central Illinois.
By contrast, Noah did get to come back to Central Illinois...and he had to fight off three new JD contestants: Mindy Dunkle, Neil Blaze, and John Clark.
The only new adult contestants in 1997 were Steve Kummer and Arlene Stoller. Meanwhile, Aaron George came back...after sitting out the previous six contests. In all, fourteen older pianists joined the four younger ones.
Mindy caught Noah at the top of the Junior Division...but he prevented her from becoming the first girl to rule the JDs because of his better technical score.
Steve acquitted himself quite well, too.
All he did was finish second in the RDs to Brian...meaning he'd also passed up Bill E., Marty M., and Adam Downey.
Yep...the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival was beginning to hit its stride, not only in terms of competition, but also in terms of fan support.
In fact, things got to the point where the performer field would grow...wildly.
When we pick up the topic again, we'll see just how wildly.
Now that it's official that the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival will take place in a new location (Oxford, MS) and will continue to happen on Memorial Day weekend, it sounded like a great, great time to pick the contest's history back up.
Where we left off, it was 1994...and Mimi Blais came to the Holiday Inn Conference Hotel in Decatur, IL (the OTPP site since 1987) and tore the place up as she snared the Regular Division's Traveling Trophy and took it back home to Montreal, QC.
And it was a year where only five Regular Division contestants and just five Junior Division ones went after prize money.
When Mimi won it all in the RDs, that did it.
Put the brakes on the shrinking of the contestant field, that is.
When we met at Decatur's Holiday Inn in 1995, six Junior Division hopefuls and eighteen Reg Division contestants took to the stage...including four RDs who decided not to go after the Big Dough the year before (after competing in 1993) and six newcomers to the division.
In addition, three of the JDs had never competed in OTPP before. In that group, there were John Schultz and two names we'd hear from for a long time to come: Noah Harmon (a son of Linda and John) and Dan Mouyard.
Newcomers to the Regular Division were Teresa Arth, Clarence Maley, Mitchell Johnson, Rod Ludwig, Howie Wyeth (a descendant of Andrew), and John Yates. (John Y., from Bowmanville, ON, teamed up with Mimi to give the contest two Canadians that year.) What's more, Brian Holland, Marty Mincer, Faye Ballard, and "Perfessor" Bill Edwards got back into the mix after a two-year absence, Todd Robbins took up the call after staying away for seven years...and John H. ended an eight-year siesta from competition, while Linda moved out from behind the judges' table to climb back on stage, end a six-year hiatus from competing, and take on the contest piano, that 1883 Weber upright nicknamed "Moby Dink."
And the biggest news of all was...Julie McClarey, six years after winning it all in the RDs, jumped back in.
It was all because of the giant competitive shadow Mimi cast.
For the first two rounds of Reg competition, it looked as if Mimi was going to keep that trophy, in spite of Julie and Linda (and those two inseparables, Marty M. and "Perfessor" Bill) tagging after her.
Still, Julie's sets got stronger with each round...until her textbook technique (standing out in "Grandpa's Spell" and "Alabamy Bound") enabled the Mom from Decatur to snatch the Traveling Trophy away from the classically-trained Montrealer.
By three points.
Meanwhile, Marty Sammon (that's right, blues fans; that Marty Sammon) showed that he wasn't going to let go of the Junior Division crown...which, this time around, he won by eight points over Max Schiltz.
Just as Mimi heard Julie's footsteps in 1995, Julie heard footsteps herself the next year...a year in which seven pianists (all but one duking it out in the RDs) tried OTPP competition for the first time.
That meant new RD'ers Gale Foehner, Will Hahn, T.J. Thompson, Brad Pregeant, John Skaggs, and an Irishman named Desmond Crawford.
The lone new JD'er, Illinoisan Hillary Fedirka, joined Max from Missouri in trying to get the title Marty S. wasn't able to fight to keep in 1996 (circumstances kept him from making the trip from the Chicago suburbs to Decatur that Memorial Day weekend).
It was almost Max' year.
Instead, 1996 was Pennsylvania Dan's year.
By three points.
Over in the Regs, Brian went from knocking on the door to the division's Top Five to kicking it down. He and John Skaggs ended up replacing Bill E. and Marty M. as the two men in the Regular Division's money line...and Faye wound up taking Linda's place in the RD Top Five. (Linda, Marty M., and Bill E. didn't taste it up in 1996.)
Julie Mac heard footsteps, all right...but she still outplayed Brian and kept her place at the top of the Regular Division. Brian, meanwhile, passed up Mimi and relegated her to third place (with Faye and John Skaggs rounding out the quintet).
But the Man from Indiana served notice...and the next three OTPP Contests would belong to him. (Well, at least the adult competition would belong to him.)
I didn't get to see Brian Holland snag his first RD crown. I'd moved from Sioux City, IA back here to Omaha, NE on 3-29-1997...and I hadn't yet earned enough vacation time at my new job (with an information technology company) to make the trip back to Central Illinois.
By contrast, Noah did get to come back to Central Illinois...and he had to fight off three new JD contestants: Mindy Dunkle, Neil Blaze, and John Clark.
The only new adult contestants in 1997 were Steve Kummer and Arlene Stoller. Meanwhile, Aaron George came back...after sitting out the previous six contests. In all, fourteen older pianists joined the four younger ones.
Mindy caught Noah at the top of the Junior Division...but he prevented her from becoming the first girl to rule the JDs because of his better technical score.
Steve acquitted himself quite well, too.
All he did was finish second in the RDs to Brian...meaning he'd also passed up Bill E., Marty M., and Adam Downey.
Yep...the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival was beginning to hit its stride, not only in terms of competition, but also in terms of fan support.
In fact, things got to the point where the performer field would grow...wildly.
When we pick up the topic again, we'll see just how wildly.
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