July 2, 2008

Benjamin's Ragtime Band Captures the Real Cohan
By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER
July 2, 2008; Page D7

New York

I am seated in the refurbished beaux-arts auditorium of the American Academy of Arts on West 154th Street. Beneath the elegant sculpted muses, time moves backward this warm spring day as the air vibrates with the infectious music of George M. Cohan (1878-1942), the "Yankee Doodle Dandy," as he himself put it, "born on the Fourth of July." In fact, though the family rigorously defended that Independence Day claim, Cohan's birth certificate was dated July 3.

The recording session isn't of Cohan chestnuts filtered through James Cagney or Broadway's "George M!" This is authentic Cohan played in the original ragtime-era arrangements. Included are familiar numbers like "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy" from the 1904 show "Little Johnny Jones"; the rousing World War I song, "Over There"; and medleys from such hit shows as "George Washington, Jr." (1906), "Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway" (1906), "The Honeymooners" (1907) and "Little Nellie Kelly (1922), performed with conspicuous élan and attention to historic performance practice ordinarily lavished on Bach, Handel and Rossini. On stage is the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra; on the podium is its founder and conductor, Rick Benjamin.

The first things you notice are the numbers' exceptional tunefulness and syncopated rhythmic infectiousness. Apart from marches and waltzes, Cohan's music often reflected the popular dances of his day: the one-step, the two-step, the high-stepping cakewalk, the sultry tango, and such anthropomorphic variations as the bunny hug, grizzly bear, turkey trot and -- longest surviving -- the fox trot. Ragtime is some of the happiest music on Earth, and listening to Mr. Benjamin's performances it is easy to understand why he has devoted his life to it.

A pianist and tubist by training, Mr. Benjamin discovered his calling as an 8-year-old in the 1970s: Seeking amusement while visiting his grandparents' New Jersey home, he wandered out to the garage, where he discovered their 1917 Victrola. He wound it up, put one of their records on the turntable, lowered the steel needle to the shellac, and "as music poured out of the dusty ancient machine," he recalls, "I was overwhelmed by a feeling of complete wonder: A new world, glowing with life, was calling out to me from another time." He was hooked.

"The sounds were somehow much more meaningful to me than the current pop music of the Gerald Ford era," he says. "The old time vocalists on these records -- people like Billy Murray and Nora Bayes -- sang with such gusto, and bands played their marches and rags with such warmth and obvious delight, that I knew in my bones that these performers and their composers were expressing their sheer joy in life through their music."

In 1985, while studying at the Juilliard School, Mr. Benjamin made his second life-changing discovery: Through a convoluted series of personal connections beginning with his ex-bandsman grandfather, he was directed to a derelict warehouse in Asbury Park, N.J. Inside was the vast music collection of Arthur Pryor (1870-1942), one of the star band conductors of the Victor Talking Machine Co. (predecessor of RCA-Victor and BMG).

Pryor, a trombone virtuoso and concertmaster of John Philip Sousa's band, had proved so adept at conducting and supervising that ensemble's recordings that Victor invited Pryor to form his own band, which quickly rivaled in popularity that of his former chief. Pryor's collection comprised scores and parts of over 3,600 pieces, a veritable time capsule of popular and concert music of the era. Equally important, the arrangements reflected the makeup of theater, moviehouse and recording orchestras before the rise of Dixieland and swing -- and thus preserved the sound of the era of Sousa, Victor Herbert, Cohan and their colleagues.

Mr. Benjamin's acquisition of the Pryor archive inspired him to establish an ensemble to play this repertoire. The ragtime revival had already gotten under way after several Scott Joplin rags were used in the score of the 1973 film "The Sting." In April 1986, the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra presented its inaugural performance to a packed house at Juilliard's Recital Hall. The program included the original 1912 score of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues," selections by Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert, and a manuscript orchestration of Joplin's "Peacherine Two-Step."

Afterward, Vincent Persichetti, a distinguished composer and Juilliard professor, approached Mr. Benjamin backstage, calling the repertoire "'America's Original Music, simple and utterly profound, all at once,'" recalls Mr. Benjamin. "He advised me to make its preservation my life's work." A few weeks later, the record producer Thomas Frost, a Juilliard guest lecturer that semester, signed the Paragon Ragtime orchestra to a recording contract. "I became so engrossed developing my orchestra full time and curating the thousands of historic orchestrations I had found that one day I cleaned out my locker and left [Juilliard] without a word."

Today, Mr. Benjamin and the Paragon have a string of CDs to their credit, many available for sale at their Web site (www.paragonragtime.com). One of these, "The Whistler and His Dog," is the recording heard along Main Street, USA at Disneyland, Disney World and Euro Disney. Paragon also tours the performing-arts-center and university circuits, playing ragtime concerts and accompanying silent films with authentic period scores.

Central to re-creating the authentic sound of the period is the instrumentation of these scores, known as "11 and piano." The basic Broadway pit orchestra of the time consisted of two violins (for the melody), viola, cello (for tender countermelodies), bass, flute (skipping decoratively around the fiddles), clarinet, two cornets (brightly underlining repeats of the violin melody), trombone (swooping up and down), percussion and piano. But much of the performance style also depends on a characteristic articulation of notes and phrases. Ragtime and other pre-swing music is remarkably crisp in sound, with important notes and groups of notes accentuated separately. This is quite different from the smooth, crooning, alto-sax manner of the big-band era.

Adhering to this pre-swing style lends an exceptional vitality and punch to Paragon's accounts of everything from Joplin, Eubie Blake and Joe Jordan to Herbert, Pryor and a host of composers whose names would be forgotten today were it not for Mr. Benjamin's joyous efforts.

Discussing the Cohan disc, slated for release in November, Mr. Benjamin observes that "Cohan's status as a show-biz legend, fostered by the 1942 Cagney biopic 'Yankee Doodle Dandy' and the 1968 Broadway show 'George M,' led to constant updating of his music to make it commercially salable to each new generation." With this new recording, Mr. Benjamin says he aims "simply to make available on record -- for the first time ever -- Cohan's music as he heard it himself, in authentic period orchestrations by the arrangers who worked with him."

And as I listen, buoyed to the rafters of the American Academy of Arts by the delectable cheer of Cohan's works, I realize the significance of Mr. Benjamin's role in protecting an important American treasure. The result will not just be a pleasure to hear but for many a true revelation.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the arts for the Journal. He is a contributor to the new book "Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Reader" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing).
 

It appears that Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra have found the answer in New World's George M. Cohan: You're a Grand Old Rag. Employing expert Cohan interpreter Colin Pritchard, period-conscious comedienne Bernadette Boerckel -- who indeed sings with the clear enunciation and light vibrato favored by historical singers like Ada Jones -- and, for the most part, the original orchestrations created by Cohan's staff arrangers for his productions, Benjamin and the Paragon hit the vein of this distant era and make Cohan's simple creations jump and sparkle. Cohan's work is ruthlessly popular, jingoistic, and straightforward, and it does not well survive modernization, though that has not deterred a cottage industry of sorts to spring up around his work in terms of tributes. New World's George M. Cohan: You're a Grand Old Rag is not a "tribute," but the real thing, and it comes with an excellent essay by Benjamin that strips away the varnish on Cohan's façade and places him in the proper context; a dominant figure in show business whose work was idolized by younger peers like Irving Berlin, setting standards that led to American entertainment as we know it. This is a superb effort and sheds considerable light on a murky, yet highly significant, topic in regard to Americana.

A 1920s Buster Keaton film still delights

"The General" is shown at the Lucas as an orchestra performs the score.

Bill Dawers

SPECIAL TO THE MORNING NEWS

The Savannah Music Festival pulled off something extra special on Sunday afternoon at the Lucas Theatre.  Built in 1921, the Lucas was originally a movie palace, a place to relax and enjoy the escape offered by a Hollywood film accompanied by live musicians.

And that's exactly what the audience got at a matinee showing of Buster Keaton's "The General" with the 12-piece Paragon Ragtime Orchestra performing the film's light, uplifting, comical score.

The 1927 slapstick comedy stars Keaton as Johnny Gray, a hapless railroad engineer who does everything wrong - and in the process gets everything right.

At first rejected by the Confederate Army, he manages to rescue The General, the stolen locomotive he's the engineer for, then defeats the Union Army in battle, earns his officer's stripes, and gets the girl.

Keaton was at the height of his fame when he made the movie, which is brimming with examples of his comic timing, physical daring, and frantic energy.

Keaton manages to express as much feeling with his face as his body. With his long nose, high cheekbones and big eyes, he conveys joy, surprise, fear, irritation, whatever emotion a scene demands.

Dressed in vintage garb like the rest of his musicians, conductor and pianist Rick Benjamin led the Paragon in a spirited performance. There were a few easily recognizable songs, like "Dixie" and "I've Been Working on the Railroad."  But much of the music was simply a direct expression of the action on the screen.

In addition to an extended chase scene with one slow-moving locomotive trying to catch up with another, Keaton is faced with a variety of obstacles - lightning, a bear, a rainstorm and a broken sword.  And the Paragon was right there, setting the mood.  Sometimes the vintage drum set stood out, sometimes the beat was set by the violins, while at other times, the cornet seemed to mock Johnny Gray's earnestness.

The combination of film and music elicited a lot of laughter from the audience, even when a train fell into a river as it traversed a burning bridge, even as Keaton unwittingly killed a Union sniper with his broken sword.

Here's hoping the Savannah Music Festival will treat the city to a similar show next year.

Knoxville News Sentinel

Music, silent movies mix well for entertaining night

By HAROLD DUCKETT
February 11, 2005

Tennessee Theatre buffs nostalgic for the historic movie palace's golden era would have enjoyed the concert by the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, which brought the silent movie period to life Tuesday night at Carson-Newman College.  The 12-player, New York-based orchestra brought along its own early 1900s projector for showing short, silent-era movies, for which the group performed the music that originally accompanied the films.

The program featured the 1922 "Cops," staring Buster Keaton; "Never Weaken," made in 1921 and starring the silent movie superstar, Harold Lloyd; and Charles Chaplin's 1917 "The Adventurer."

According to the ensemble's conductor, Rick Benjamin, who has built a career out of accompanying silent movies, by 1916 there were 21,000 movie theaters in America, about half of which had orchestras that accompanied the silent films. Much of the music for these early films were not original scores at all but compilations of fragments of the popular music of the day. Sent out, along with the movie reels, was a list of pieces, which the local conductor would put together for the performance. The accompanying instructions indicated exactly where in the movie each section of music was to be played.

Of course, aside from the conductor, the most important musician in the band was the percussionist, whose responsibility included providing all the bangs and crashes for what was happening on the screen, no matter what music was being played.  The Paragon's percussionist, Kerry Meads, was an expert at getting just the right sound when Keaton, Lloyd or Chaplin slipped and landed on their behinds, kicked someone else in the rear or crashed through something.  Such moments were funny especially because of Meads' efforts.

Along with the Paragon's playing of Scott Joplin's 1907 "The Gladiolus Rag," and W. C. Handy's 1913 "Jogo Blues," performed as musical interludes as the projectionist got ready for another movie, the whole show was terrific.

It was a great window into the past.

Sarasota Herald Tribune

San Francisco Chronicle

Washington Post

Green Bay Press-Gazette

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune

CLASSICS TODAY
January 7, 2004
Artistic Quality 10 /  Sound Quality 10

BLACK MANHATTAN
Theater and Dance Music by Members of the Legendary Clef Club

Paragon Ragtime Orchestra
Rick Benjamin
Awet Andemicael (soprano); Edward Pleasant (baritone)

New World Records- 80611-2(CD)

This album collects ragtime and jazz classics of composer/ conductor James Reese Europe and his contemporaries. The performances recreate the style of the legendary Clef Club, a ragtime orchestra composed of African American musicians that operated from 1910 to 1930. Europe was a prominent figure on the black music scene during this time, as was Will Marion Cook, whose In Dahomey was the first all-black musical, and its full-scale overture is this collection's most substantial offering.

The disc begins with Europe's exuberant "Castle Perfect Trot", a light, bright, dancing romp that sets the high-spirited tone for the majority of the disc. This, and numbers such as J. Turner Layton's "Strut Miss Lizze" and Cook's "Swing Along!" have such an infectious beat that you'll hardly be able to resist tapping your toes. This is as much true today as in 1902 when Bob Cole and the Johnson Brothers penned the song "When the Band Plays Ragtime", which (as sung beautifully here by baritone Edward Pleasant) offers a wry commentary on the social friction engendered by "jazz" music. Cole and Johnson provide the disc's other vocal offering, the exotic "Under the Bamboo Tree", in a stylized period performance by soprano Awet Andemicael.

There's plenty of variety here to give a representative sampling of some of the era's finest pop music, and it's all played with polish, authenticity, and all-out enthusiasm by the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra under Rick Benjamin's inspired direction. The recording provides natural perspectives, warm presence, and dynamic punch. Those who think ragtime begins and ends with Scott Joplin are in for a pleasant surprise, while aficionados no doubt will treasure this uniquely enjoyable disc.

--Victor Carr Jr