Max Morath Interview

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"MY NEVER-ENDING ADVENTURE"
Interview with America's Music Man Max Morath

By Christopher M. Wright
© 2005 Christopher M. Wright
All Rights Reserved

AMAZON CD LINKS BELOW - Listen to Samples

Part 1 - The Ragtime Era

He strolls out on stage just as he has for 50 years, dapper in a vested suit as stylish today as it was a hundred years ago. He parks his derby on a coat tree and sits down at the piano. "Tonight you're going to be listening to the music of some 19-year-olds," he says, launching into Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag or Irving Berlin’s Everything in America is Ragtime.

Pianist, humorist, singer, actor, and composer Max Morath has been called one of America's greatest entertainers and a national treasure by National Public Radio. His one-man shows interweave ragtime numbers with comedy and commentary on the history and social conditions in turn-of-the-century America that spawned the music.

Morath jokes that he hasn't had a steady job since 1959, “and that was in a saloon,” he says. Instead he's played piano in the honky-tonks of the Colorado mountains, entertained diners in upper crust supper clubs, toured with Dinah Shore, been a radio announcer, appeared regularly with Arthur Godfrey on CBS, created two series for public television, written and appeared in dozens of commercials, recorded numerous albums, and authored The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Popular Standards as well as The Road to Ragtime (the latter with his wife, photographer Diane Fay Skomars and Ralph Schoenstein). - Amazon links below.

In the first of two interviews, Morath talks about why there's more to ragtime than Scott Joplin and how the music was revived in the 1970s. You will also learn the inner workings behind Morath’s unique and elegant ragtime piano style.

Q: What are you working on currently?

Morath: I'm writing a fictionalized novel about the composer Carrie Jacobs-Bond [1862-1946] who wrote I Love You Truly, the second-most widely recorded song in popular music history after Stardust. She was a fascinating woman, one of the most successful composers and business people in the most male-dominated of all businesses, music publishing, for many, many years. Also, I'm planning a radio series on ragtime and early-day popular music at WFMT-Chicago. And I'm still touring the most recent version of my one-man show which I introduced in New York last year called Ragtime and Again.

Q: In 1996 at the age of 70, why did you decide to get a master's degree in American Studies at Columbia University?

Morath: I had always wanted to and never had the opportunity before. My wife, [photographer] Diane Skomars, helped me make the leap. ‘Stop talking about it,’ she said. ‘Just do it.’ American Studies combines liberal arts, history, and economics and I just thought, 'That's for me!' I went two full semesters and summer school in sequence, then took the following winter to write my paper which was on Carrie Jacobs-Bond.

Q: How else have your studies shown up in your work?

Morath: A study of American culture, politics and media gave me new contexts for my work on American music and theater. I took courses on film, female writers, the Constitution, and economics, among others. Material I got from those courses helped with sketches for my shows. For example, I became more interested in [presidential candidate] William Jennings Bryan who was key to a lot of issues that influenced a century of American life. So I introduced a sketch in which he used a ragtime piece by a young Milwaukee woman as his campaign theme in 1908.

Q: Set the stage for us. You have said that the ragtime era [circa 1890-1920] was a wonderful place to visit but you wouldn't want to live there. What was going on at the time that is still with us today and what parts should we be glad got left behind?

Morath: We have certainly left behind a lot of, but not all of, the worst attributes of racism which in the first twenty years of the twentieth century were vicious and affected people in the music and theater business. The most blatant example, which sounds preposterous today, is that black performers whatever the tone of their skin were forced until the early 1920s to work in burnt cork - blackface. The leading, best known black performer, Bert Williams, who died in 1922, worked in cork his entire career.

We have begun to severely question and regret the fever America developed to get into World War I, which took the world into a century of madness. One of the reasons I admire William Jennings Bryan is that he resigned from [President Woodrow] Wilson's cabinet in 1915 because he felt Wilson was taking us toward war.

Another bad element was Prohibition. It was an unreasonable use of the Constitution and we should have known better. Also at that time was the widespread prevalence of death and disease. We've conquered - at least, in the Western world - so many of the things that used to kill us off, like diphtheria, scarlet fever, and especially tuberculosis. We lose sight of the fact that less than a century ago these diseases were killing a lot of people, especially children.

One of the good elements that arose remarkably in that same time was the absolute onrush of major technological breakthroughs - the electric light, the telephone, sound recording, the movies, automobiles, flight, anesthetics - they all occurred right around the turn of the twentieth century. When people first heard recordings, they couldn't believe it. They were taught to believe flight was impossible. Those things fascinate me. Max Morath is not a guy who fears technology. I'm often asked how I feel about electronics and synthesizers taking music in new directions in the twenty-first century, and I think, 'good for them.'

Q: Going back to race for a moment, it seems ironic that black performers were given such a hard time, yet their music is such an indispensable part of our national treasure today. I can't imagine America without it.

Morath: Ragtime and jazz originated with black musicians. In the theater, a musical that broke ground was Shuffle Along, the 1921 Eubie Blake/Noble Sissle Broadway production. With a cast entirely African-American, it toured very successfully and was the first hit musical to employ ragtime and jazz. It influenced all the Broadway composers for years to come. Irving Berlin said he went to it 13 times.

Q: You have called ragtime ’the first form of popular music.' It certainly was the first 'shock-your-parents' youth music, long before rock'n'roll. What are some of the other ways in which ragtime set the frame for jazz, rock'n'roll, and everything else that followed?

Morath: The word 'ragtime' in its recent revival has come for many critics and musicians to mean only piano music, principally that of Scott Joplin. 'Ragtime', in its own era became a generic term, as have other blanket terms since, such as jazz and swing and rock. When you read the trade papers from the period and they're talking about some new ragtime tune, it's not Scott Joplin's latest piano rag. It’s probably a song from Tin Pan Alley or a Broadway show.

Ragtime, in that large sense, was the first form of popular music to be thoroughly merchandised. Pop music was not big business or industry, really, until around 1900. Also, ragtime both in the vocal and the theatrical sense was not only the music of the younger generation, it was the music of the underdog, people climbing up the ladder of success. There's a wonderful quote from George M. Cohan who was second-generation Irish. He said 'if it weren't for the Jews, the Irish, and the Negroes, there wouldn't be any popular music.'

Ragtime broke through in providing new freedom for the performer, thus anticipating jazz and other forms to come. It triggered the advent of 'style'. Ragtime licensed the musician or singer to fool around with the beat – work ahead or behind it, or inside of it. Ultimately this new-found freedom applied to the melody, the lyrics, and everything else. You could improvise!

Q: What was unprecedented about your award-winning TV series on ragtime in the 1960s and how did it change the face of public television?

Morath: People have lost sight of the beginnings of what we now call public broadcasting. In the '50s, it was called NET - National Educational Television. Mostly, it was simply one camera and one instructor in front of a gray drape giving a lecture. Some new people who came from broadcasting said, 'look, we're not getting any viewers. We need to introduce into our programming the basic tools of entertainment.' That means a set, costumes, makeup, and pace and rhythm. I was working with a producer at that time out in Denver and he suggested to me that we do a pilot on the ragtime era. It was accepted and financed and we shot two series, a total of 26 half-hour shows, dealing not only with ragtime in all its forms, but with the manners and morals, the politics – all aspects of American society during that period. My series was the first to be shown nationally on videotape instead of kinescope film, the technical quality of which was very poor. I'll be frank with you, one of the reasons my shows got so much attention was because they looked so good. Of course, it was all black-and-white then. I'm very proud of the content of the shows, I worked very hard on them.

Q: Is it true that the series is not available on video?

Morath: There were no home videos then. The last I checked with the PBS archive, they've still got some of the original two-inch reel—to-reel tapes but if they run them over the heads, they risk losing the oxide. I think it’s a clear case of what’s called ‘technological obsolescence’.

Q: Well, there are laser turntables that read vinyl LPs without touching the disc, so maybe somebody will come up with something similar that doesn't touch the videotape. Turning back to the music, you have recorded several discs of solo piano ragtime music. To my ear, you are the best ragtime piano player. What's distinctive about your approach?

Morath: I've approached piano ragtime as music. That may seem obvious, but so much of the approach to ragtime over the years has been 'gimmicky' - that it all sounds the same, that it should all be played at the same fast tempo, that for many years it had to be played on a tinny honky-tonk upright. I was one of the first to dump that. I insisted on performing on a grand piano. I do not play everything at the same tempo. I use ritards [slowing at the end of a phrase] and dynamics [loud-soft variations], whether or not they are written on the score. I figure that if Scott Joplin had been asked whether he wanted to play a honky-tonk piano with tinny hammers or a 9-foot Steinway grand, which would he choose?

I don't think there's just one tempo for rags. It's been overworked that Joplin said 'don't play this fast.' There are some rags should not be played fast and some that should. People often ask me should ragtime be played fast or slow. I reply that the answer is 'Yes.' A further distortion in the tradition of rag is that many people listened to it only on player pianos, which had no expression whatsoever and were played too fast. And rags were used to accompany chase scenes in silent movie houses. All of those things hurt the musicality of the rags.

Q: My piano teacher said you were the best ragtime piano player because you pull an orchestral sound out of the piano, partly through the use of the sustaining pedal. Do you agree that your pedaling that sets you apart and do you think it's what the composers intended?

Morath: I use the pedal with great planning and care to bring out some of the things I was talking about earlier - musicality, dynamics, rubato.... As for the composers' original intent, of the classic rags, only two or three of them have any pedaling indicated at all. A few of the old-timers I knew who played for dancing in the honky-tonks said they didn’t pedal at all because it blurred the notes. But that doesn't mean that the original great black pianists didn't use the pedal. For one thing, the scoring of all the early rags was incomplete. The publishers did not print the original manuscripts; they were too complicated. Eubie Blake said he was told to rewrite his so they could be played by 'the girls in the five-and-ten-cent store.' In those days, sheet music departments [the main way music was sold] employed young women who were good sight-readers who could play well from the manuscript at first sight. The sheet music was watered down and simplified.

By the way, we have no idea how Scott Joplin played. He made piano rolls which were touted in the 1970s revival as hand-played, but no, the rolls were doctored and provide no expression. They are disappointing, to say the least.

Q: How did you get on to your approach?

Morath: In the 1950s, I was playing saloons and honky-tonk pianos in the summertime in the mountains in Colorado. Then, in the winter, I'd be in nice supper clubs working on a grand piano playing standards, in a jazz matrix. Playing both styles and taking a dual approach to the piano brought me to the idea that the best rags are music. If you were playing a great Gershwin tune, would you muck it up on a bad piano too fast, or would you give it nuance and bring your own individual taste to it?

Q: Ragtime piano involves syncopation in which the left hand keeps a steady beat and the right hand plays against it, off the beat. The hands come down at different times. A friend of mine says it’s like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. Also, it's a swing rhythm and not everybody can swing. Did you find the groove naturally or did you get there by a set of exercises that you can recommend to others?

Morath: I don't know of any specific exercises that can lead you in that direction. But I don't think we can say that ragtime in its early sense 'swings' like the music of the 1930s. That has to wait until we get to the stride pianists, who were more jazz-influenced, such as Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. The idea of 'swinging', to me, doesn't really happen until you get into 4/4 time [four beats to a measure, a quarter note equals one beat]. The early piano rags are essentially syncopated marches in duple time [2/2, 2/4, 2/8] with that very steady left hand which represents the bass, the drums, the tuba. The right hand is the wind instruments syncopating against them. The tempo is often the tempo of the march. There are players, including Morath, who have been criticized for adding a little too much feeling of 4/4, a little bit too much jazz injection into rags. But many pianists don't do any of this and play the rags so rigidly they lose their appeal.

Q: Scott Joplin was the greatest ragtime master, you say. A serious, schooled man who knew his Chopin. Which of his rags do you recommend?

Morath: Joplin only had one big hit, The Maple Leaf Rag, in 1899. It remains, probably, the biggest selling piano rag of all time. He worked very hard and published about 50 others. Of all the ragtime composers, he was the one with the gift of lyricism. There are beautiful melodies in his rags, not just piano figures. And, by the way, his rags are nowhere near as difficult as others of the period, with a few exceptions like the Maple Leaf which is probably as hard a rag to master as there is in the literature. But melody is one reason why people love Joplin’s The Entertainer, because you can hum it. Solace - also used in The Sting - Easy Winners, Weeping Willow, Wall Street, these are very lyrical rags.

Q: After Joplin, where should the musically curious look for great ragtime works?

Morath: Of his contemporaries, the best known for piano rags are Joseph Lamb, James Scott, and Eubie Blake. For ragtime as theater and song, don't overlook Irving Berlin or black theatrical composers such as James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosamond, Bob Cole, Alex Rogers, Chris Smith, and many others. These men brought ragtime’s syncopations to the words as well as the music. Their music is out there, and the research tools are much better than they were even ten or fifteen years ago.

Q: Why did you think it was worth devoting an entire album to the work of female ragtime composers? AMAZON LINK BELOW

Morath: At the turn of the twentieth century in America, the piano was a white woman's instrument. If you were a little white girl, you probably took piano lessons. With the invention of the upright, there were five million pianos sold in the US between 1900 and 1925. Before then, if you couldn't afford a grand, you didn't have a piano. Those middle-class young women discovered ragtime, a highly pianistic music. I'm sure a lot of them didn't even know that their mentors were black men. But they heard the music and thought to themselves, 'I can do that.' The women on the album were kids, really, mostly in their teens. Most, sadly, gave up composing when they got married. I would not have made that album or promoted these women if I didn't think their rags were very good. I was led to make the album because, in going through my collection of ragtime music year after year, I kept seeing their names and noticed they were published by the major companies, so I began to look at them more closely and concluded they had gone too long without being recognized.

Q: How did the ragtime revival of the 1970s get started?

Morath: I'll take a little bit of the credit because of my TV series which was rerun all through the '60s. The important book was They All Played Ragtime by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis (Knopf, 1950). AMAZON LINK BELOW It was reprinted three times through the '50s and '60s. It's a beautiful book, mostly about the black players and the then-undiscovered Joplin. It has a full glossary and index. Then a few individuals, including Bill Bolcom started writing rags and promoting Joplin's opera Treemonisha [which won Joplin a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1976]. A St. Louis player-composer, Trebor Tichenor, probably the most knowledgeable about every little nook and cranny of ragtime, was one of the leaders in some early ragtime festivals on the Goldenrod riverboat in St. Louis, which got national attention. Also, Tichenor has published widely on the subject.

But the main forces that triggered the 1970s revival were the following: In 1971, the New York public library published the complete Joplin, including the score of Treemonisha. The opera was produced for the first time in Atlanta and it was fabulous - it got a lot of publicity. By 1972, Joshua Rifkin and Bill Bolcom were recording piano rags for Nonesuch. I was doing albums for Vanguard. Then Angel released the Red Back Book, an album of orchestral ragtime conducted by Gunther Schuller [which won a Grammy in 1973]. Angel and Nonesuch were considered classical labels, so ragtime albums went into different bins in record stores, the classical bins, for the first time. Suddenly, you had the classical music critics reviewing ragtime. Wonderful! It did us all a lot of good. It was no longer about nostalgia or honky-tonk. It was classical and those albums sold fabulously.

And then, the Red Back Book became the basis of the music for The Sting even though ragtime didn't fit the era of the movie at all. The movie is about the Chicago of the 1930s. Ragtime, of course, is turn of the century. But the producer, George Roy Hill, was smitten by the Red Back Book arrangements, and he asked the young arranger-composer Marvin Hamlisch to score the movie with these rags. Of course, it was a smash hit, the score winning an Oscar. Hamlisch, oddly, was criticized by ragtime purists, who must have missed his gracious credit to Joplin when Hamlisch was awarded the Oscar. Many others then recorded ragtime music, mainly Joplin, including James Levine, Andre Previn, and Itzhak Perlman and other prominent figures in classical music.

Q: Are there any young ragtime pianists working today you consider worthy successors?

Morath: Absolutely, Reginald Robinson, an African-American in Chicago, a fabulous player and a composer. He recently received a MacArthur grant. Another is Scott Kirby, a highly schooled musician and superb pianist. He's writing some really great music for the piano. They're both taking ragtime in new directions. I think that's what we have to do. We can't keep imitating Joplin or staying with the same bag of tricks. We have to move on and these two players are doing so.

Q: That's interesting. It calls to mind how bands are breaking new ground in the Hot Club style of Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt.

Morath: Don't forget, Bill Bolcom, Max Morath, the late Donald Ashwander and others were writing rags in the 1960s. I consider Bolcom's rags some of the most beautiful music ever written for the piano.

Q: When I first heard Bolcom's Graceful Ghost rag, I was so enthralled I ran out and got the sheet music to learn how to play it.

Morath: Gorgeous piece of music. It’s out there now in arrangements for everything from chamber to symphony to you name it. It’s being used by musicians of every discipline all over the world.

Visit the Max Morath website - biography, soundbites, and more

Part 2 - The Great American Songbook

Live Show with
Commentary

The Road to Ragtime
(snippets of life while traveling between shows)

Gunther Schuller's
Red Back Book The Sting

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