Charles Luckyth « Luckey » Roberts (1887-1968)
"Pork and Beans Rag" (1913 )
"Jewel of the Big Blue Nile", chanson extrait de "Baby Blues" (1919)
"The Tremolo Trot", one-step (1914)

Eubie Blake (1887-1983)
"I'm Just Wild About Harry", one-step d'après "Shuffle Along" (1922)

Frederick M Bryan (1914-?)
"The Dancing Deacon:Clef Club Fox-Trot"

Sidney L Perrin (1873-1910)
"Well Rais teh Roof To-Night", cakewalk (1904)

Clarence Cameron White (1880-1960)
"Chant", extrait de "The Bandana Sketches", op. 12 n° 1 (1921)
"I'm Goin' Home", spritual setting (1921)

Turner Layton (1894-1978)
"Dear Old Southland", extrait de la comédie de Broadway "Strut, Miss Lizzie" (1921)

Scott Joplin (1688-1917)
"Wall Street 'Rag'" (1909)

James Bland
"Oh Dem GOlden Slipper", minstrel song (1879)

Gussie Lord Davis (1863-1899)
"In the Baggage Coach Ahead", ballade (1896)

Sissle and Blake
"Love Will Find A Way", extrait de "Suffle Along" (1921)

J. Leubrie Hill (1869-1916)
Ouverture "My Friend from Kentucky"

Clarence and Spencer Williams
"Royal Garden blues" (1919)

Tom Lemonier
"Just One Word of Consolation", ballade (1905)

Turner Layton (1894-1978)
"After You've Gone", onte-step (1918)

William James « Willie » Dixon (1915-1992)
Delicioso:Tango Aristocratico"

Clarence G Wilson
"The Zoo-Step" (1916)

Q. Roscoe Snowden (1887-)
"The Slow Drag blues" (1919)

Al Johns
"Ianthia March" (1902)

National Negro Hymn (1900)
"Lift Every Voice and Sing"

Janai Brugger, soprano
Andrea Jones, soprano
Chauncey Packer, ténor
Edward Pleasant, baryton
The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra
Rick Benjamin, direction, piano

Dès huit ans, Rick Benjamin trémulait d'un ragtime brinquebalé entre mioches au garage, quintessence vite décrétée d'une joie de vivre plutôt envahissante pour ses grands-parents, propriétaires du carpharnaümesque local. Fondateur (en 1988) mais en culotte longue de la présente formation, cet homme... orchestre, pianiste comme tout arrangeur, rejoignit la Juilliard School pour donner dans le tuba, jusqu'à ce qu'un dégât de chicot l'édentât tel un Popeye empêché. Il busoqua alors à étudier Pryor, grand tromboniste de la fin du 19ème siècle, de la maison quasi démolie duquel il exhuma 4000 partitions swinguantes, jouées avec ses étudiants. Morceaux d'avant jazz droit venus de l'encanaillement européen petit-bourgois salonnard, parfois chantés, sur fond de valse ou fox-trot, mais sans oublier l'âme du blues. Ni ce cocasse cakewalk prisé par Debussy (Golliwog's Cakewalk, Général Lavine-excentrique) par lequel les noirs ridiculisaient leurs maîtres petits blancs attifés-pomponnés pour leur bal du samedi soir, où un gâteau (cake) récompensait le meilleur danseur. Bref, du classique syncopisé (d'où ce tout de même oxymore : Black Manhattan!) et son grand manitou, Scott Joplin. Gardons tout cela de stimulant à l'esprit via ce troisième volume d'une série absolument irrésistible, dont surtout la perfection instrumentale soufflée vous fera, vous aussi, trémuler pardon ! du popotin. Piégeant en somme joyeusement le mélomane le plus séraphique dans la bonne réalité humaine de ce qu'il a de plus bas. (Gilles-Daniel Percet)

This is the third volume of Paragon Ragtime Orchestra recordings documenting the music of important African- American composers from late 19th- and early 20th-century New York City. The inspiration for this effort came about twenty-five years ago, when I read James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1930), a fascinating chronicle of the city’s black artistic life from the Victorian era to the Harlem Renaissance. I came to Johnson’s volume after finishing Eileen Southern’s The Music of Black Americans (1971), a wider-ranging academic work, but a no less revealing one. After reading these books I was excited to listen to the music they had described. But this was problematic: I discovered remarkably few available recordings of historic African-American music, and even fewer to represent New York’s pioneering black composers. This inability to actually experience a considerable span of our musical heritage was a void that needed to be filled. Clearly it was time for a carefully curated new recording of first-rate performances played from authentic scores. Fifteen years and three Black Manhattan volumes later, we have recorded three and a half hours of this previously neglected music: sixty pieces by thirty-two outstanding African-American composers, spanning the seminal years of the 1870s to the early 1920s. It is our hope that these efforts have started to close this gap in America’s cultural memory. Our even greater hope is that these recordings will enable the world to rediscover this magnificent music and the gifted, spirited, and persevering people who gave it to us.