It’s standing-room-only on a late February afternoon at tony Occidental College in Los Angeles, where some 200 students are about to learn that genius can come in unexpected forms.
The guest lecturer is from the very un-tony West Side of Chicago. He seats himself at the piano, gently places his fingers on the keyboard and proceeds to reel off ragtime tunes of astonishing complexity. In just a few beats his hands become a blur, the instrument begins to shake, and the kids find themselves swaying in their seats.
Between numbers, each of which draws a clamorous ovation, the pianist weaves a lecture. His subject is ragtime, and he traces the music’s evolution from the classic works of Scott Joplin to the ferociously difficult and ornate original rags that he is unfurling on this balmy California day.
Seldom, if ever, have the students at Occidental, where tuition and lodging hover at $40,000 a year, received tutoring of this sort. The visiting professor, after all, dropped out of high school and taught himself his art before going on to compose a stack of certifiable, state-of-the-art ragtime masterpieces.
“How much did you get for the MacArthur ‘genius’ award?” one of the students inevitably asks, referring to the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship that the pianist received last fall.
“Half a million dollars,” replies 32-year-old Reginald R. Robinson, with a demure grin. “And that’s half a million more than I ever had before.”
Indeed, just before Robinson learned last September that he had won one of the most lucrative and prestigious awards in the country, the gas in his West Side apartment was cut off and overdue notices from the electric company were piling up.
He was so broke and despondent that he’d given up practicing piano, ceased composing new music and very nearly stopped believing that he could make a living in ragtime-an art form that had been dead for roughly 80 years until Robinson came along and decided to try to breathe life back into it.
That a young man whose childhood was punctuated with shootings and other inner-city horrors–a kid who failed 7th grade before eventually bailing on the Chicago public schools-should emerge as the leading hope of a long-lost art form would seem remarkable enough. But that he taught himself practically everything he knows about music, spending years decoding notes and chords, only underscores the magnitude of his achievement.
Yet on this day, as on most others, his focus is not on his arduous journey but on its goal, the music.
“A lot of people think ragtime is hokey,” concedes Robinson, who stands about 5 feet 8 inches but produces the colossal sound of a much larger man. “But in my mind, it’s deeper than that. . . . You can hear every emotion; all of life is in it.”
Certainly all of Robinson’s life is.
Above all else, Reginald Robinson remembers two things about his turbulent childhood-the gang-bangers who repeatedly broke into his family’s third-floor apartment in the Henry Horner Homes, and the ice-cream truck that chimed a lilting, syncopated melody as it rolled slowly along West Lake Street in the crushing summer heat.
If the violence scarred Robinson, the ice-cream truck’s mechanical jingle may have saved him.
Robinson recalls jumping every time he heard gunshots fired in the streets. “I mean, almost anything you can imagine was going on over there. One time, some guy was trying to break in while we were at home! We were looking at him, and he was looking at us.”
Another time, the Robinson family-two parents and six children-returned home from a movie to find their apartment being ransacked. “These guys had everything all over the place,” says Robinson. “The front door had melted. I guess they used some kind of heating apparatus or something to get in.”
Amid the chaos, Robinson sought refuge in music wherever he encountered it-on the radio, on the LPs that his folks played at home, ranging from Bach to Basie. And even from that ice-cream truck, with its twinkly little tune that was written by ragtime legend Scott Joplin-though back then Robinson had no idea who wrote it, nor had he ever heard of Joplin.
In fact, Robinson never thought about that song-Joplin’s indelible “The Entertainer”-until one Friday afternoon during his second tour of 7th grade in 1986. A group of Chicago jazz musicians from the Urban Gateways program was playing at Robert Emmet School, in the Austin neighborhood, where Robinson’s family had moved a few years earlier.
To Robinson’s amazement, one of the musicians began playing the ice-cream truck song. The music evoked pleasant memories that stood out against an unsettling childhood, and awakened in him an overwhelming desire to capture those sounds, to make them on his own.
“Something really was pulling me into that music,” says Robinson. “It’s strange to me; I’m still trying to figure that out.”
Though he may never determine exactly why Joplin’s melody–it had regained prominence in the Oscar-winning 1973 film “The Sting”-changed him, he knows that he had never felt anything like it before or since. In that beguiling little tune, he found a purpose for his young life, a way to bring some order out of the anarchy surrounding him.
“It just did something to him, it excited him so much,” says his mother, Janet. “He came back home and told me all about it.”
The 13-year-old Robinson immediately began rifling through dictionaries and other books at home, searching for any reference to “ragtime” but finding none. So he wrote the word down on a piece of paper to ensure that he wouldn’t forget it before Monday, when he was able to look it up at school.
Every day after that he wandered to the back of the classroom to thumb through the pages of a dictionary until he arrived at “ragtime,” reading the definition over and over, writing it down, memorizing it, absorbing it.
The text cited Joplin as “the king of ragtime,” and soon other books pointed Robinson to “The Sting,” which used Joplin’s music as a backdrop and sparked a brief revival of interest in ragtime in the 1970s. Robinson found a videotape of the film and played it repeatedly to study its score. Then he moved on to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton silent films, which similarly featured ebullient ragtime piano music as accompaniments.
Each day, his obsession deepened. “I was on a hunt,” says Robinson. He begged his parents for a piano and eventually got a small electric keyboard, which he hammered constantly. His playing was crude, as the tapes he made of himself show, the fledgling pianist inventing snippets of melodies akin to nursery-school songs.
Meanwhile, the violence of the neighborhood constantly bumped up against Robinson’s life. The house that the family bought in 1987 on the South Side had more space than anything they had before, but the new neighborhood didn’t seem to be any less dangerous than the ones they left behind. Drug deals and armed violence remained fixtures of everyday life.
It got so bad that Robinson’s mother decided she had to walk her kids to the front door of their schools and pick them up in the afternoon to ensure their safety. Even when Robinson was a teenager, his mother accompanied him to the steps of Tilden High School.
“The young people that went to that school began to carry guns,” she recalls. “Reginald saw several of his classmates get shot, and it made him not want to go back.”
He dropped out during his freshman year and retreated into his bedroom, teaching himself piano on an old Jensen spinet his mother had acquired from a neighbor. Someone had put stickers on each key with the name of every note, so Robinson was able to read the long runway of otherwise inscrutable black and white keys.
From morning until night he struggled at the piano, trying to find chords where the unskilled hand strikes only dissonance, working to pick out melodies from a seemingly infinite range of possibilities. When he wasn’t hitting the keys, he was listening to recordings by Joplin, Louis Chauvin, Tom Turpin and others, trying to re-create on his piano the intoxicating sounds they had invented a century earlier.
For three years, Robinson rarely left his bedroom. And through the sheer intensity of his focus and the depth of his gifts, he began to play ragtime.
“He played continuously, over and over and over, until one day it turned into music,” says his mother.
Adds elder brother Marlando Robinson, “I couldn’t believe what he was accomplishing. One day he put on a tape of something for me, and I said, ‘Was that Joplin, Handy or Chauvin?’
“And he said, ‘No, that’s me.’ “
A skeptical Marlando marched Reginald over to the piano, insisting that he demonstrate this feat live, not on a cassette player.
“His hands flew so fast, you couldn’t even see them,” recalls Marlando, still somewhat incredulous.
In those three years-a blink of an eye in the course of most musicians’ training-Robinson had remade himself from a kid who didn’t even know the word “ragtime” into a creator of original tunes.
Though at age 16 he still had a lot to learn about writing a first-class composition-how to create multiple themes, how to switch from one key to another, how to replicate and even extend the formal structures of Joplin and other ragtime greats-Robinson surely had found his voice.
Yet he was dissatisfied that he still stumbled at reading music, that he couldn’t accurately put his compositions to paper, that almost everything about the nuts and bolts of ragtime music eluded him-except how to create it and how to play it.
So he got a job at a silkscreen shop in the neighborhood to pay for a few music lessons at the now-defunct American Conservatory of Music, in the Loop. At his first session, his instructor was as skeptical as his brother Marlando had been.
“He played a number of his pieces for me, and I just couldn’t believe he had created them, because he hadn’t had any lessons,” remembers his instructor at the conservatory, Ted Bargmann.
“For a teacher, it was hard to believe. But then I realized it was true-he showed me the music. The stems on the notes were going in the wrong direction, some of the rhythm notations weren’t correct, but these were basically the notes he played. It was some kind of miracle.”
But Robinson was just getting started. Deciding that neither Bargmann nor anyone else could teach him how to create ragtime any better than he already was doing, he again holed up in the bedroom of his parents’ house.
In a burst of creativity, he wrote nearly a dozen compositions of unusual complexity and harmonic sophistication, even though he didn’t know the names of the chords he was creating or understand the musical devices his ear was leading him to.
He saved up enough money to buy another used piano and added that to the other one in his bedroom, placing his bed between the pair of instruments. Night and day the young man literally was surrounded by music.
To help him connect with the spirit of the ragtime age, he pulled the red velvet curtains down from his parents’ living room and hung them in his bedroom, conjuring the ambience of the old-time brothels where ragtime music emerged. Sometimes he took the shade off a lamp and placed the fixture on the floor so that it cast moody shadows across his room, the play of light and half-light helping him imagine that he was living in the gaslight era.
“It was like mentally transporting myself out of where we are now and into another zone,” says Robinson. “Like I’m no longer in the present-I’m in 1907.”
The result of these efforts was groundbreaking, even though almost no one outside the Robinson home knew it. The surging rhythms of “The Strongman” (composed in 1990), the poetic phrases of “Troubador Serenade” (1990), the sturm und drang of “Nile River Ripples” (1991) and the rhythmic swagger and bawdy chords of “Poker Face Blues” (1992) heralded the arrival of a new kind of ragtime, an
art form that had essentially atrophied after Joplin’s death in 1917.
Even the titles of Robinson’s pieces reflected his fertile imagination. “Boogie Man Creep,” “The Hustler’s Two-Step” and “Ebony Venus” evoked exotic worlds of sound and image.
Though pianists such as Dick Hyman, Max Morath and others long had played the old tunes nobly, and a couple dozen latter-day ragtimers wrote retro music of their own, no one was crafting compositions as intricate and original as Robinson’s.
Perhaps because he never was taught the rules of harmony and theory he was not constrained by them, building his oft-fanciful compositions on unanticipated chord changes, unusual bursts of dissonance, unorthodox turns of phrase and unexpected clashes of traditional and contemporary techniques.
Feeling ready by the early 1990s to bring his ragtime creations into the world, he began seeking out other Chicago musicians, finally lucking out in 1992 when he met the brilliant pianist Jon Weber, who long has ruled over the lounge of the Four Seasons Hotel. Though commanding an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz history, Weber was stunned at the freshness of Robinson’s art.
” ‘Where’d you study?’ ” Weber recalls asking. “And Reginald said, ‘I didn’t.’
“He was 19 years old then, and these scores, they were so precise and so fastidious, I could hear exactly how they sounded by looking at them. And I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe this humble man has produced all this.’ It was almost like he was living in another time; he was living, breathing, dreaming that bygone period.”
Weber soon realized that Robinson had perfect pitch, a gift that surely had enabled him to learn music and master composition without benefit of a teacher. Weber became his first and most ardent champion, paying for studio time so that Robinson could record his bulging catalog of original works.
Weber brought dozens of cassette tapes of the studio sessions to sell at Robinson’s low-key, Sunday-afternoon debut at Uptown’s Green Mill Jazz Club in September 1992. The tapes practically flew out of Robinson’s hands, inspiring him to bring a copy to Bob Koester, owner of the respected, Chicago-based Delmark Records.
“What he was playing sounded totally original,” says Koester, who immediately signed Robinson to a recording contract.
“He wasn’t just playing ragtime like most of these guys play it,” a reference to the buttoned-down, note-perfect, often-anemic renderings of many players a generation or two older than Robinson.
Perhaps because he had learned ragtime as its original creators had-on his own, without formal training, note by grueling note-Robinson’s music sounded all the more authentic, credible and true.
Not surprisingly, Robinson’s recording debut in 1993, “The Strongman,” earned lavish praise from critics, musicians and scholars.
Dick Hyman, for decades one of the country’s top interpreters of ragtime and other early-American styles, remembers being caught off guard by the quality and depth of Robinson’s original works. “Reginald had so absorbed all the classic rags that he could write them as well as the old masters could.”
And play them. His version of Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” which opens “The Strongman,” became something of an instant classic. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that plays a piece like ‘Maple Leaf Rag’ who comes as close to Scott Joplin’s piano roll as Reginald does,” says Trebor Tichenor, one of the leading scholars of the genre.
Within months, Robinson was taping Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” radio show and broadcasting live, nationally, during a New Year’s Eve double-bill with Weber at the Green Mill.
But just as Robinson’s career was taking flight, it began to sink in how marginal ragtime was in the spectrum of musical tastes at the turn of the 21st Century. He was paid a $1,000 advance from Delmark for “The Strongman,” and got only $2,000 up front for its follow-up, “Sounds in Silhouette” (1994)–not exactly a big-time payday for work he had spent years creating, even including modest royalties.
And though various ragtime festivals booked him when he was a novelty on the scene in the early 1990s, Robinson’s engagement calendar never filled out.
“I simply had no money,” he recalls of what he terms his first great “slump,” in 1995. “I was at a really low state, where I was just trying to look for a [day] job, and ended up going from door to door in the Loop, trying to put in job applications. I was borrowing money from my mother just to try to live.”
He began working as a day laborer for a packaging company in Elgin, serving food at a Loop restaurant, washing autos at a car-rental place downtown-anything to support himself and his music.
The $3,000 advance he received for his third and most ambitious Delmark CD, “Euphonic Sounds”–which made history by including a fragment of a Scott Joplin tune Robinson discovered while scrutinizing an old photograph–did not pull him out of debt. The bills only mounted after he moved out of his parents’ house in 1999 to live with a girlfriend in Uptown.
Why couldn’t a pianist of such distinction and achievement earn even the barest subsistence wage with his music?
“You’ve got to remember that 98 percent of any jazz musician’s life is worrying about how to make the rent or a car payment,” says Weber, a veteran of the financial squeeze. Robinson’s position was all the more precarious because he had chosen to work in one of the most arcane subsets of jazz.
“He was in a strange spot. He should have been playing all the ragtime festivals, but there’s a lot of latent racism there,” says Koester, describing an insular milieu that features white performers playing for mostly white audiences. Robinson, with his urban-looking cornrows and ragtime iconoclasm, couldn’t crack this nostalgia-based circuit.
“He should have been playing the jazz festivals, too,” adds Koester, “but [they] generally turn their backs on traditional jazz.”
There was another, deeper reason why Robinson was overlooked by the very music world that is starved for talent of his caliber, and that’s the stigma of ragtime itself.
Born in the post-slavery era when blacks were suffering profoundly, ragtime was used as the backdrop for minstrel shows and other demeaning entertainments.
“Even when ragtime was popular, there definitely was a 50-50 split about it in the black community,” notes Tichenor, the music scholar. “Eubie Blake said his mother told him to ‘take that ragtime out of my house,’ knowing where ragtime came from.” In other words, the sporting houses and streets.
Jelly Roll Morton, who started out as a ragtime piano player in the brothels of New Orleans’ Storyville vice district, literally was kicked out of his family’s home as a teenager and left to fend for himself when his grandmother found out he was playing the illicit music.
Associations of this sort, of course, have nothing to do with the inherent value of the music, as Robinson has proved, but the aura lingers. Many audiences and musicians, including a number of African-Americans, “would rather put that part of the past behind them, and who could blame them?” says Hyman. “That’s why what Reginald has done is such a brave act of individuality, to go against this attitude the way he has.”
As the 20th Century slipped into the 21st, Robinson spent the hours away from his temporary day jobs composing tunes for his next-and still unreleased-album. Aptly titled “Man Out of Time,” the homemade CD contains one intricate ragtime opus after another, each a world of pitch and rhythm unto itself.
The recording, a milestone in the maturation of his art, culminates in “The 19th Galaxy,” a ragtime tour de force that reaffirms Robinson’s position at the front lines of the art form.
Reluctant to take the recording to Delmark, where he had received so little money for his previous efforts, he shopped the CD elsewhere but could find no takers.
He moved out of his girlfriend’s place in 2003 and into affordable housing for artists on the West Side, but he still found himself slipping into financial ruin. Only a cash gift from a friend made it possible for him to take his piano with him. The future looked bleak.
“Man, here I am again,” he told himself. He looked for janitorial jobs, stockroom gigs, anything that could provide steady money. Even menial jobs were hard to find. Meanwhile, he felt himself losing his will to write music and practice the piano. “It was just not fun anymore,” he says.
Out of desperation, he took his “Man Out of Time” CD to Delmark last year. Koester offered him a $2,000 advance, which Robinson urgently needed but ultimately declined to accept, saying it would amount to “signing my soul away” for a pittance.
On the day the MacArthur Foundation telephoned, Robinson was lying in bed, chilled to the bone because the gas had been cut off, wondering what he would do when the electricity went next.
When Daniel J. Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows program, told Robinson that he was a winner and would receive $100,000 annually for the next five years, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t dreamed it. For hours afterward, he kept checking his caller ID to make sure it really was the MacArthur Foundation that had phoned.
He went to the bathroom to splash his face with the icy cold water coming from both faucets, then spent the next couple of days chewing over what had happened before telling anyone else.
Finally, he went to his mother’s house on the South Side and asked her to come for a drive with him. They had traveled all the way to the suburbs before he pulled over and said, “Don’t jump out of your skin, but I just won the MacArthur Award.”
Janet Robinson was familiar with the prize and its mysterious ways–the foundation secretly seeks out and researches potential candidates before selecting winners whose lives will be changed.
On hearing the news, Robinson’s mother couldn’t catch her breath.
“I was surprised, I was ecstatic,” she recalls. “Oh, man, tears just came to my eyes.”
Suddenly, Reginald Robinson, ragtime pianist, was back in business, a development that posed interesting problems of its own.
For starters, the years in which he hadn’t composed any music and the months in which he hadn’t touched a piano meant that a great deal of his art had escaped his fingertips. To this day, he says, he struggles to recapture the pieces he once tossed off with ease, to relearn his virtuoso technique.
“The MacArthur thing kind of caught me off guard,” says Robinson. “I’m getting engagements now where there used to be nothing, and so I’m being pushed to get my music up. That music on ‘Man Out of Time,’ I have to learn it again.”
After the lecture at Occidental College, students swarm around Robinson, asking to buy the CDs he brought and imploring him to autograph them.
Later that day he ventures to Hollywood, which he never has seen, and asks a journalist to photograph him with a disposable camera Robinson just bought. The setting is the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine, along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where the beehive tower of Capitol Records looms nearby. Then on to other celebrated sites.
On practically every block, Robinson wants another picture to prove to his family-and, perhaps, himself-that he really was here, a kid from some of the toughest parts of Chicago, who literally played his way out of there.
Even so, Robinson is quick to point out that he’s “still half literate,” as far as music is concerned. “I still do not know simple things–simple terms in music, I still don’t understand.”
He goes to a Los Angeles video store to see if he can pick up any of the science-fiction films he devours in his spare time. Like ragtime, he says, these films take him to other places, far away from his everyday life.
For the most part, though, he spends his waking hours consumed with music–reading books about it, listening to recordings, practicing the piano, honing his compositions. Most of his life, in fact, plays out in his apartment, his never-ending immersion in ragtime music interrupted periodically with trips to the concert stage or visits to his family’s South Side home.
Though he hasn’t decided exactly what he’s going to do with the MacArthur money, he knows what he wants to accomplish: “I want this ragtime music to be accepted, to be back in the mainstream,” he says.
There’s one more thing Robinson wants, and has wanted since he heard the ice-cream truck music played by real musicians in the 7th grade: He wants to compose the ragtime masterpieces that are still left unwritten-the music that he says wafts quietly through the ether, waiting for someone to capture it.
“I always had this thought in my mind that these melodies, if I listen long enough in silence, that I’ll hear this music that’s not yet written down-I mean that,” he insists.
“I think that there are things Scott Joplin never got a chance to write down, and things that many other ragtime musicians never got a chance to write down.
“And I can catch that–if I listen.”
– – –
HEARING REGINALD ROBINSON
A Chicago Tribune-produced documentary on Robinson, excerpts from a videotaped interview and additional photos and audio of the pianist are at bancodeprofissionais.com/ragtime.
ON THE WEB:
Robinson’s new web site, with information on his concert appearances, workshops and recordings, is www.reginaldrobinson.com.
ON DISC:
“THE STRONGMAN” (Delmark Records, 1993).
Robinson’s stunning recording debut established his credentials as interpreter of Scott Joplin’s music (his version of “Maple Leaf Rag” can be considered definitive) and composer of opulent original works. From the driving energy of “Just Try and Escape the Devil” to the whirring virtuosity of “Boogie Man Creep,” Robinson announced himself as a singular figure in American ragtime.
“SOUNDS IN SILHOUETTE” (Delmark Records, 1994).
Though not as consistently effective as “The Strongman,” Robinson’s quick-turnaround follow-up to his CD debut contains such notable originals as the ebullient “Jack Johnson Rag,” the serenely graceful “The Ventriloquist,” the blues-drenched “Swampy Lee” and the rip-roaring “Knuckle Fingers.”
“EUPHONIC SOUNDS” (Delmark Records, 1998).
Robinson made history with this remarkable recording, having excavated a tantalizing, 30-second snippet of a lost composition by Joplin (he found it in an old photo of Joplin’s piano, the score perched above the keys). The “Joplin Song Fragment” opens the disc, which elegantly juxtaposes Robinson originals with rarities by Louis Chauvin, James S. Scott, Joseph F. Lamb and others.
“MAN OUT OF TIME” (unreleased).
Robinson’s greatest work to date, “Man Out of Time” documents his mastery of form and maturity of gesture on every track. From the nobility of the title tune to the sublime lyricism of “So Deeply,” from the epic sweep of “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” to the dizzying technical feats of “The 19th Galaxy,” “Man Out of Time” shows how deeply Robinson has taken his investigations into ragtime.
IN CONCERT:
June 5-7, John William “Blind” Boone Ragtime & Early Jazz Festival. Robinson will make appearances throughout the festival at the Historic Missouri Theatre, 203 S. 9th St., Columbia, Mo.; a $78 ticket includes admission to all events; phone 573-445-2539 or 573-874-1139, or contact Lucille Salerno at salernol@missouri.edu.
— H.R.
———-
hreich@tribune.com
