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Ragtime Rover
Happy Birthday Eubie Blake
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Even the New York Times bought into Eubie’s white lie: “Five days after his 100th birthday was celebrated with gala performances of his music,” the paper reported on February 13, 1983, “Eubie Blake, the composer and pianist whose career covered a span from the ragtime era in the 19th century to the contemporary Broadway theater a year ago, died yesterday at his home in Brooklyn.” I don’t know if Wikipedia’s reliability should have precedence over that of the Times (Gore Vidal would say absolutely it should, and often enough I have to agree: Wikipedia did not mislead us into war on the Judith Miller-Ahmad Chalabi bandwagon), but the great encyclopedia, relying on the work of Peter Hanley, has it that Eubie set his birth year back five years, although his “1917 World War I draft registration, 1920 passport application, and 1936 Social Security application” all cite 1887 as the birth year. But back-dating among jazz musicians was an old habit back then: the great Jelly Roll Morton, too, put himself five years back “to give himself an earlier entry into the New Orleans jazz scene,” Hanley writes. All the same: today, February 7, is Eubie Blake’s birthday, and the man should be celebrated. He would have been either 124 years old or 119. I’ve scrounged up a couple of items. The first is his own composition, “The Charleston Rag,” performed by William Albright, from an old 1982 LP of mine by the Musical Heritage Society, likely out of print, called “Sweet Sixteenths: A Ragtime Concert.” The piece should have you zapping out of your seat and playing the imaginary piano (or dancing with your cubby neighbor) three bars in. Eubie only rates one piece on the album (others include Joplin of course, Joseph Lamb, Clarence Woods, and William Albright). The second piece features Eubie Blake himself—speaking, explaining and discoursing, not playing. It’s a piece called “The School of Ragtime,” it’s by Scott Joplin, and Eubie tells you what he thinks of it in his wonderfully raggety voice. Here they are in mp3 format:
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| THE DAILY JOURNAL |
VANPOEM |
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As One Put Naked Into a Cigarette Boat
Continue chiding, since it's part of the new aesthetic,
and parcel to our coming home, as if
we'd disappeared into the burning bush
that calls to those who sit vacantly in parlors
awaiting a fate freighted with song and dance.
I stroll while staring and raging
with difficulty at the stubborn sky.
On my honor I step a little distance
from behind the curtain, only to disappear
the moment no birds sing, which occurs frequently.
Leaves dustier than furniture, the sound
of sleeping grating through the cosmos,
my footstool, my only talisman.
It's been real, arguing on your behalf.
Gray cobweb shadow, falling, floundering,
finding a place to not be shy and think
boldly about the oldness of beauty, a place
to rest its weary insubstantial head.
It may be that I stand on the threshold
of the checkout line, unsure of what
to be impulsive about, which momentous emptiness
to spontaneously identify my alienation with,
what kind of languor to slide into
before being reduced to grubbing for credentials,
locked in that tumid late-afternoon skin,
effervescing in its sea of dreams.
And all the things hearkening back to it,
the boat ride to breaker beach
there at the end of one world
where it paid to rage at the stammering waves
that kicked and screamed solely for my benefit,
staged objections to the inexorable fact of me.
Look: I've installed a turnstile in my kitchen,
so your picture-postcard of desolation has no power over me.
In this doggy-dog world land is made motionless
and the broads are standing on the wharves
with some of that sipping whisky on those silver trays,
which we'd be a bear to pass up. You speak
of the old gods who've washed up on shore,
but I don't see them, don't hear their hue and cry,
though their maze awaits us, will amaze us.
Here, let me get this little rock out of my damn shoe.
Then we can talk about paddling off to parts unknown. |
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—Van Foreman |
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