Schuller’s Ragged Side Conductor Shows Another Facet Of His Considerable Talent With Ragtime Concert

Spokane Symphony Sunday, April 2, at North Idaho College

‘The guy is just amazing.” That was the phrase I heard again and again Sunday. It came from professional musicians, students and just plain audience members during the intermission and following the “Afternoon Concert of Ragtime” at North Idaho College.

The concert, the finale of a weeklong forum in Coeur d’Alene, was one of those rare occasions of blissfully happy music-making.

The guy people were talking about was Gunther Schuller.

And the group that helped him elicit the amazement should have been labeled the Spokane Symphony Ragtime Ensemble (it wasn’t, though) - 16 symphony players who looked and sounded as though they were having the time of their lives.

Schuller and his group served up a generous helping of 15 rags and rag-derived early jazz and novelty numbers.

Mention Schuller’s name in Spokane and vicinity, and people think of the vitality and freshness he brings to symphonic classics in concerts at the Opera House and at The Festival at Sandpoint, or to the music of Bach at the Northwest Bach Festival. Sunday’s ragtime showed another side of the amazing Mr. Schuller.

Schuller’s aptitude to amaze stems from his capacities as a scholar, composer and performer. He combines the scholar’s curiosity about music - any music - with the composer’s skill at getting inside a piece of music and the performer’s ability to bring out what he finds there.

Ragtime began as piano music, the players making “ragged time” of the marches and straight-laced dance music. A lot of the effect depends on the crispness of the sound of the piano. Schuller managed to achieve that authentic ragtimey bounce and zip with an ensemble of strings and winds plus a piano and drum set.

Appropriate to a college setting, Schuller illustrated the evolution of march to rag to Dixieland jazz with Scott Joplin and Scott Hayden’s “Sun Flower Slow Drag.” First he had it played straight as a march, then with syncopated shifts as a rag, then howled and growled as early jazz - a painless, but instructive, lesson in music history.

Lest anyone think all rags are the same, Schuller and his group played James Scott’s sweet, smooth “Birdbrain Rag” (who knows where these names came from) alongside Joseph Lamb’s peppy “Hilarity.” There were some rollicking, raucous Jelly Roll Morton pieces which Schuller transcribed from Morton’s 1926 recordings with the Red Hot Peppers. And there were modern rags by Rob Carriker, Stefan Kozinski and by Schuller himself.

Schuller’s deft way with ragtime should have come as no surprise. Many people, myself included, first got to know Schuller through “The Red-Back Book,” an album of Scott Joplin rags he recorded in the early ‘70s with the New England Ragtime Ensemble. The album helped push along a world-wide ragtime revival.

That album, still as delightful as it was then, has been re-released on Angel-EMI (CDC 47193). Even better, though, is the more recent “The Art of the Rag” on the GM label (GM 3018CD), an album on which Schuller leads the New England Ragtime Ensemble in 17 rags, including most of the music heard at Sunday’s North Idaho College concert.

If you missed the concert, get the albums. If you heard it, I’ll bet you can’t wait to have them.