“Remember that eerie moment in `Amadeus’ when Salieri first encounters Mozart’s music and almost can’t believe it?” asks Chicago pianist Jon Weber, who recently had a similar experience.
“Salieri looks at these Mozart scores and thinks, `Oh my god, this is astonishing, this is divine.’ Well that’s how I felt. I saw these compositions, and they gave me chills.”
In this instance, the scores in question had been penned by a precocious Chicago teenager who not only had written music more sublime than anyone could have anticipated but, incredibly, had taught himself how to read music, how to play piano and how to create, of all things, modern-day ragtime music.
That Reginald R. Robinson had accomplished all this despite enduring all the disadvantages of life in crime-ridden West Side and South Side neighborhoods, that he had made himself into a musician despite a lack of money, formal training or high school education (he dropped out of Tilden High early on) almost defied believability.
Fortunately for Robinson, the musician he turned to for guidance did not behave as Salieri did in “Amadeus.” In other words, Weber, a formidable jazz pianist in his own right, was overcome not with jealousy of the younger man but with a desire to help him.
Thus, nearly two years after Robinson and Weber first met, the young pianist appears to be on the verge of achieving national recognition. His debut CD, “Reginald R. Robinson: The Strongman” (Delmark) has earned praise from no less than pianist Marcus Roberts and multi-instrumentalist Ira Sullivan.
In addition, Robinson will be flying to New York next month to record a segment of Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” show, which will be broadcast over National Public Radio; he already has begun work on a follow-up disc for Delmark; and “he has accumulated a pretty tall pile of invitations from places as far off as Italy asking him to come and perform,” adds Weber.
Yet to Robinson, who recently turned 21 and has been composing piano rags since his mid-teens, the remarkable course of his young life is not so surprising.
“I can’t say exactly why I turned to ragtime, but I do know that when I started feeling depression and anger about my life, I would drift off into ragtime to relieve all those feelings,” says Robinson, seated comfortably at the piano in Delmark Recording studios, on the North Side.
“I guess for a long time I felt bad about my living conditions, about the lack of money, about the three-room house where my mother and (step-)father and two sisters and three brothers lived.”
Those unchanneled resentments, however, found an unexpected outlet when Robinson was in seventh grade at Robert Emmet School, where he heard a group of musicians performing a variety of pieces, including Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”
“At the time, I didn’t even know it was `The Entertainer,’ and I sure didn’t know who Scott Joplin was,” recalls Robinson. “But I remembered hearing that tune on an ice cream truck all the time, only now I was hearing it played for real, and it knocked me out.
“The musician said it was ragtime, so I had to hold that word in my head all day until I got home, and I almost forgot it. As soon as I got home, I looked it up in this encyclopedia of black musicians that we had, and that’s when I started learning about ragtime music, and about how the movie `The Sting’ made ragtime popular again in the ’70s.”
For the average youngster, that might have been the end of it, but Robinson is far from average. After persuading his mother to buy him a spinet, Robinson, then 15, began his journey in earnest. He did not yet know how to read music, he did not yet understand the difference between 4/4 and 3/4 time, but that didn’t stop him from creating ragtime pieces of astonishing complexity (such as “The Scamp,” a harmonically and rhythmically intricate piece that is included on the “Strongman” CD).
Still, “I felt really depressed that I could look at a piece of music by Scott Joplin and couldn’t even read it,” says Robinson, who took a few lessons at the American Conservatory of Music, then a few more at a South Side music shop. At both places, Robinson recalls, “The teachers started telling me all this stuff that was so advanced I didn’t understand it-they didn’t know I couldn’t even read music.”
By the time he turned 17, though, Robinson had mastered the rudiments of reading and-more important-notating his own music, and so he began to write ragtime music constantly. “Good Times Rag,” “Petunia Rag,” “Ballerina Figurine,” “Boogie Man Creep,” “Just Try and Escape the Devil,” “The Hustler’s Two-Step,” “Poker Face Blues”-the sheer number of pieces to come from his pen, the burst of creativity, was as remarkable as Robinson’s ability to play these tours de force. The poetic titles, too, say a great deal the sophistication of this work, which covers a wider musical and emotional range than one often associates with traditional ragtime.
Talent of this caliber, of course, will not be denied, and by the late ’80s word of Robinson’s accomplishments began circulating in Chicago music circles. Jazz legend Ira Sullivan heard the youngster and pointed him toward stride piano virtuoso Weber, who promptly marched him into a local recording studio to make a demo (“He recorded 17 tunes in two hours-incredible,” says Weber). Then Weber passed the tape along to everyone he could think of who might be able to help, including Delmark owner Bob Koester.
Koester decided to record Robinson’s first CD and dubbed him “the most astounding new talent we have recorded since (avant-gardist) Roscoe Mitchell.”
But the most remarkable aspect of this urban Cinderella story remains Robinson’s music itself. Far more than just a proficient imitation of historic ragtime forms, Robinson’s rags sound as fresh, real and vital as the Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Chauvin originals that inspired them. Where far more celebrated composers, such as William Bolcolm, have attempted to mine the ragtime form only to come up with stiff, unpersuasive facsimiles, Robinson’s burst with melodic urgency and rhythmic vitality.
If his performances are a bit rough technically, Weber insists this owes not to any shortcomings in Robinson’s pianism but simply to “the incredible complexity of his music. I can’t play his rags until I practice them slowly and carefully with each hand alone. The music is at least as thick and tricky as anything by Rachmaninoff, except that it’s in the ragtime style.”
When the great jazz pianist Marcus Roberts first heard Robinson’s work, during a “blindfold test” conducted by Down Beat magazine, he said, “Very beautiful playing. I give him 4 stars. You could have told me that it was a Scott Joplin tune and I’d have believed it, definitely.”
Where all this attention and acclaim will lead Robinson, and how he will cope with it, no one can know.
Weber, who remains his mentor, says, “I can see him scoring movies. Sometimes he’ll sit at the piano, look out the window at old buildings and imagine another era, and he’ll start improvising the most sublime ragtime music. Imagine what he could do with a movie score.”
For his part, Robinson doesn’t want to be so much a ragtime performer as a composer and, eventually, publisher.
“I want to help get the whole ragtime thing going again,” he says.
“Eventually, I want to move to New Orleans, so I can hear the music that Jelly Roll Morton heard-or at least hear music that’s close to what he heard before he came to Chicago.”
Sound crazy? Maybe, but one hesitates to underestimate Robinson.
A SHORT COURSE ON RAGTIME HISTORY
Following is a brief introduction to the world of ragtime, beginning with appearances by Reginald Robinson and looking back at the history of the music represented on CD and video and in books:
Reginald Robinson: The Strongman (Delmark). One of the best ragtime recordings to come along in years, Robinson’s CD opens with an exuberant reading of Scott Jopin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” and proceeds with 20 of his own intriguing compositions.
Robinson also plays with pianist Jon Weber New Year’s Eve at the Green Mill Jazz Club, 4802 N. Broadway (phone 312-878-5552).
Joshua Rifkin: Maple Leaf Rag (Elektra/Nonesuch). Rifkin was important to the ragtime revival of the ’70s, though his refined approach to the music represents the antithesis of Robinson’s rambunctiousness.
Dick Hyman: Joplin Complete Solo Piano Works (RCA); Joplin Piano Music (RCA). Hyman combines the erudition of Rifkin’s playing with the spirit of Robinson’s, making his Joplin collections particularly important.
Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis: “They All Played Ragtime” (Oak Publications). This book is the definitive history of ragtime, told in a vivid style yet with scholarly detail.
Scott Joplin: Treemonisha (Sony). This opera may be the most sublime work Joplin ever wrote. The beautifully sung Houston Grand Opera production treats the piece with the respect it deserves.
