Bring Back the Bolcom Rag

Marc-Andre' Hamelin's interpretations of William Bolcom's Rag cycle

Somewhere in the middle of the dreamlike “Contentment,” one of many ragtime fantasias written by American composer William Bolcom, there’s a departure from the usual march-music structure. The easygoing original tempo falls away. There’s a brief pause, followed by a swift detour into Debussy-like impressionism — via a nine-chord phrase that ascends in stairstep fashion, somewhat echoing the coda of John Coltrane’s “Naima.” That’s followed by another symmetrical phrase, also moving upward, built on different harmony. The ascending chords evoke a feeling far removed from the usual boom-chink clatter of ragtime — they’re the vague outline of a search for bliss, the tracks of an unexpectated entanglement with the sublime.

On his new recording of Bolcom rags, pianist Marc-Andre’ Hamelin makes the most of this contrast. Through a combination of delicate attacks and careful sustains, he holds onto the emotion embedded within those ascending chords, lets them hover in the air when the rhythm of ragtime resumes. Hamelin’s performance neatly sidesteps rag’s staid conventions; rather than treat the style as quaint historical artifact, he follows Bolcom’s gaze to look outward from it. He finds — and expands to wide-screen proportion — wondrously genreblind moments of tenderness, technical daring, and unapologetic whimsy.

Throughout the new recording, Hamelin operates as a kind of manic tour guide. He evokes the old-timey jaunt of ragtime and then jolts it dramatically forward (check “Rag Tango”), until it’s only distantly raglike, if at all. He tears through Bolcom’s demanding flourishes, which sometimes race up and down the keyboard in cartoon fashion, as though he just discovered how much fun they are to play at breakneck speed. He draws attention to Bolcom’s more angular writing — the chord sequences riddled with tense bebop extentions, the steady clip-clop syncopations (that “ragged” rhythm that inspired the name “ragtime”) interrupted by outbreaks of fitful modern polyrhythms. Meanwhile on “Contentment” and “Epithalamium,” Hamelin conjures a nostalgic wistfulness that’s infused with traces of Bix Beiderbecke’s 1927 pre-jazz classic “In A Mist.”

The Bolcom rags are insanely hip. The prolific Bolcom — who has composed chamber music, opera, symphonic works and a boatload of smart cabaret songs he’s performed with his partner Joan Morris — began composing them in the late 1960s, after encountering the score to Joplin’s then-little-known opera Treemonisha. At the time, there was very little interest in ragtime, which experienced its cultural peak between 1895 and 1919. (Incredibly, even into the 1960s, some of Joplin’s key works, including Treemonisha, had yet to be properly recorded.)

That didn’t matter to Bolcom. As Hamelin said in a recent interview, Bolcom dove into ragtime in a huge way: “He was just completely consumed by this musical form. His main rag-writing activity only lasted a few years - after that they became more sporadic - but he produced some really significant things. They're full of interesting details which could have come only from someone who was completely classically trained; the harmony is so interesting and so involved at times that it is a further spicing-up of what we've heard in Joplin's rags.”

It was Hollywood that stirred interest in ragtime, via the 1973 hit film The Sting. The soundtrack was largely devoted to Joplin rags performed by Marvin Hamlisch, whose version of Joplin's 1902 rag "The Entertainer" became a Top 40 hit in 1974. That triggered a ragtime boomlet, which led classical pianists to Bolcom’s compositions. Hamelin has recorded some of them (as well as Bolcom’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 12 New Etudes) in the past; the new 2-CD release (which has not turned up on streaming services yet) stands as the most authoritative and musically nuanced document of Bolcom’s ragtime work.

Given the fragmented everything-all-the-time nature of popular culture, we’re not likely to see another ragtime revival, no matter how clever Bolcom’s pieces are — or how rhapsodic Hamelin’s renditions. That doesn’t make this album a futile endeavor. Instead, consider it an illustration of some of the many ways music can mutate. Here’s a style that was popular for a brief time over a century ago, and then nearly vanished. Along comes a curious contemporary composer, who writes genius playful variations and insurrections based on the style that also happen to expand the style. These captivate a brilliant performer who renders the pieces in sculptural detail, and with pure joy. Joplin lives.