Your music has become such an integral part of the Magic Kingdom experience for all these years, I am now beginning to wonder what they were actually using before they licensed your recordings.
You know, I don’t actually know. As a little kid, of course, I went there a few times, but I really don’t remember what they had going on there. So that part of the equation, I couldn’t tell you.
So what is it about this music that caused it to transcend from a project for you to a life mission?
You know, it was such a fascinating era in our country’s history. There were so many interesting things happening in invention…it was a time of great invention. You had the Wright Brothers and Edison and all these new technologies; The Electric Age. Life was being changed into the form as we recognize it now. There were great political changes; conditions for women, minorities and working people were beginning to improve.
It was also a really interesting time in art and architecture; and it was the first time that our country really had its own form of musical expression, which of course is ragtime. Before that time, all of our pop music was European-based. It wasn’t actually composed in the “Old Country,” it was styled after the patterns of the Old World. So there are several reasons why that historical period is so interesting to me.
And then, there was also this tremendous vacuum of scholarship; people weren’t researching the era, they weren’t recording scores, and they weren’t giving concerts like we do. The ragtime revival in the 1970s only touched on some of these issues. So we really wanted to get down and explore these things, and that’s what we’re doing.
Traces of this music are the DNA of all popular music. I can show you examples of ragtime music from 1902 that have the same riffs and fills that are prevalent in rock ‘n roll tunes that we all know; the same rhythms are in rap songs! The music is still there; it’s the basic framework of just about everything that is happening today. It’s an interesting point that not too many people are even aware of. There is an American culture within living memory that just needs to have a flag being flown for it.
Keep up with Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra at the official website.
And come check out the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra live on the following dates:
- October 22 at Weis Center for the Performing Arts at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA (Official 25th Anniversary Concert!)
- April 28, 2012 at Freeport High School in Long Island, NY (Silent Film program)
- June 30, 2012 in Long Beach, CA (Venue TBA)
- July 14, 2012 at Kingsborough College Amphitheatre in Brooklyn, NY (Scott Joplin concert program)
ON THE BOARDWALK is available at Amazon, Amazon Digital, and at the Paragon Ragtime website.
THE WHISTLER AND HIS DOG is available at Amazon and at the Paragon Ragtime website.
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