Sample
recordings by Keith Hinchliffe
Click on the links below to download short MP3 files or to play Real Audio clips of Keith playing some samples of the repertoire. If
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Naked Ladies and Electric Ragtime (Michael Chapman)
The
music
Ragtime
is probably best known to most people from the soundtrack to the
film "The Sting" and most of the music in the film, including the
theme tune "The Entertainer," is by the greatest of the ragtime
composers, Scott Joplin.
Like the
blues, ragtime can be partly traced back to the folk songs and
dance music of the plantation slaves in the American deep south,
but "classic" ragtime was written piano music from the years between
about 1895 and 1915, Joplin's own heyday. It was "parlour music"
played as much by white as by black people. In this period, other
crazes such as the "minstrel song" and the cakewalk dance spread
rapidly.
A syncopated
ragtime "feel" can be found in a lot of jazz and other music of
the 1920s onwards, and the word "rag" keeps popping up in song
titles throughout the great period of "Tin Pan Alley" songwriting.
There is a strong ragtime element in the guitar playing of some
of the early bluesmen, especially Blind Blake and Mississippi
John Hurt. .
