"Honey Moon Rag " With Tom Brier
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.ย. 2024
- Tom performing at the Oakhurst Vintage Music Festival. Steve Drivon added percussion, Robin Drivon on Tuba. Oakhurst CA, April 2013 www.fresnoflats... Tom Brier CD's www.cdbaby.com/... or contact him on FACEBOOK for the latest release
Tom's awesome. He just seems so cheery and positive all the time. I started self teaching piano about 6 months ago and Mr Brier has become my idol :)
Keep practicing.......Good Luck in your progress.............VBR
+verybigrifle Thanks man! I have my grade 1 exam in October. Wish me luck :D
:) :)......VBR
@@MrToftheL Tom is the best player you will ever see. As good and better than the classical gurus too.
@@PreservationEnthusiast For sure. He's as good as those really popular classical players like Valentina Lisitsa or Lang Lang
This man is one of my biggest heroes. I've been a guitar player for about 15 years now, but he has inspired me to teach myself to play the piano, but more specifically has ignited a passion for ragtime that I never knew I had. I will work hard to play at the same level he does, and one day hope to learn a few of his songs so they can continue to be shared with the world. After all, the world needs more Tom Brier!
There are people who dig out the rarities and the forgotten tunes, those who enjoy the contemporary rags and encourage the young players and composers, and those who write the music and keep ragtime alive and kickin': Tom Brier is three-in-one. Thanks, VBR
You're assessment is spot on........Thanks for comments and watching.. You are most welcome.............VBR
And there are those who know what ragtime is and should be, who search out the best, and who take the time, effort and expertise to record it for us. Thanks back atcha.
IMO, the third theme of this piece is one of the all time greatest, period. It is so fine, beautiful, triumphant and self-assured, with perfect voice-leading and really attractive melodies.
100% perfect rhytme and notes
I'm years later to listen to this but hope you get to hear that. You are a wonderful musician.
So gorgeous.
Glad you enjoyed it Chris......I had never heard it before that I recall....Thanks for watching....VBR
Prayers for Tom’s recovery
Also featuring tuba by Robyn Drivon and drums by Steve Drivon :)
PERFECT TEMPO, AGAIN!
NO it is not...MUCH to fast....
@@adamglinka1 Don't know where you got that idea. Of course different tunes require (or are best suited to) different tempos. However, not to be snobby, but I've heard probably upwards of 1,000 recordings by now from the ragtime era, AND of ragtime-era performers recorded later in life.
I can say with some authority that most of the (recorded) ragtime musicians would have played it either a little slower than this, a little faster (maybe as much as 10% to 15% faster), or right about here, but not very slow. Most ragtime was NOT played that slowly back in the day, or at least RECORDED at that tempo.
That is because most ragtime was played for dancing, not listening, and dances like the two-step and fox-trot had certain tempo ranges that put them right for dancing.
Vintage recordings had to be put more or less in those parameters (unless the piece is a showpiece taken at an 'exhibition tempo' for listening only, like the fast rags of Mike Bernard or James P. Johnson), or else the record buyers would be unhappy, BECAUSE many people actually DANCED to the music of the phonograph in the old days, the same way they might dance to a pianist or orchestra in a dance hall etc.
By the same token, the printed tempos on piano rolls had to be REASONABLE when played back on the player piano, they couldn't be too ridiculous, although of course there was much more flexibility to change tempo there to suit the listeners' taste, without changing pitch.
@@adamglinka1 To continue with this topic, I have been doing a slight overhaul of my other TH-cam channel "Great Pianists" where I have many playlists of vintage recordings and rolls by pop, salon, ragtime and jazz pianists of the 'teens and 'twenties.
I put this out there so you see I'm not 'keeping all this stuff to myself' because I WANT as many people as possible to find, hear, enjoy and be inspired by these great old rolls and recordings, so they're not just playing mechanical sounding sheet-music versions of this very lively music, but playing in a more INFORMED way a little bit closer to the original pianists.
Tom, IMO, is one of the 'informed' pianists who has spent hundreds of hours listening to and transcribing vintage recordings and piano rolls of original greats. That is one major way that he has gotten so good... besides of course studying, learning and analyzing the published sheet music to thousands and thousands of rags.
Of course I don't have NEARLY everyone covered yet (and I guesstimate the sum total of pianists who RECORDED or MADE ROLLS (even only one record, or one roll) is probably not more than 5% of all the professional pianists who were active in those decades).
But- it's a good start.
Of course you can find many cylinder and disc recordings from the ragtime era of bands, orchestras, vaudeville and studio singers, etc on phonograph collectors' TH-cam channels as well, like "VictrolaMan", "Tim Grayck" and many others.
@@andrewbarrett1537 RAGTIME piano and STRIDE piano are two different things. J.P.Johnson and Fats Waller were STRIDE pianists .
But thank you for the lecture.
One can always learn something..
Greetings...
I can respect this interpretation. Tom's playing here is amazing as always. However I have to agree that this rag is better slower, in my opinion. Especially the first and second sections, which have graceful and somber feels to them, respectively. That being said it sounds good either way; Tom notoriously loves to add his own flair to the pieces he plays, and always performs rags in a very lively manner. I think this approach works very well in his performance of Sensation, for example, where he plays it at a much faster tempo than most other pianists and adds a slight swing to it.
I really like this one! It has some interesting parts I've never heard before (if that makes sense). Thanks Carl for the video :-).
Does your piano have a built in 🥁. Because it's most irritating. I want to hear the 🎹
It's normal for ragtime to have drums.
That piano looks similar to my grandmother's except hers was an old player piano she had turned into a regular one. Only thing is middle c on hers is off key and painful to listen to.
Well, tune it! :) What is the make of piano? If you wanted to make it a player piano again, there are player parts in rebuilders' 'bonepiles'. Or wait... 'was'? Do you still have it?
@@andrewbarrett1537 shes still alive dk its in her house. I'll have to check the next time I go over
Why do so many performances (or at least MIDI sequences) play the B strain only once the first time but twice when it returns after the trio? Even though it is common both to ask and not to ask for a repeat of a reprise when the original was repeated, unusual in any ragtime piece to have a reprise repeated when the original was not.
Because "as written" is just a guide for gifted performers. Tom NEVER plays just the notes on a page. Play what and how they want......Most times never quite the same each time.........Less BORING that way........Thanks for comment...........VBR
Once upon a time, when I first started out playing ragtime, I was very careful to play pieces exactly as written, and played on the slow side, the way many classical pianists play ragtime.
However, I come from a jazz background (two family members are well known professional jazz musicians), and have been blessed to hear ragtime played a variety of ways since I was young.
So, after a while hearing great players like Tom and then thru them getting into the ORIGINAL recordings (which to me, are still WHERE IT'S AT if you really want to learn this music RIGHT), and being stunned how FEW of these old time pianists actually played ANYTHING as written (and I don't mean jazz... I mean pre-jazz),
I realized that you don't HAVE to even follow the exact structure of the score exactly, because this is popular music, not exactly classical music. Scott Joplins, James Scott's, Joseph Lamb's, Artie Matthews' and Paul Pratt's rags were certainly 'classic' and they hoped (or in the case of Mr. Matthews, ORDERED) that they'd be played as written, but they were the exceptions to the rule, as most pop composers who wrote rags, songs etc SIMPLIFIED the sheet music so the people at home could play it, and in their recordings and rolls THEY don't even always stick to the structure of the tune closely.
So, I tend to play more as I feel the piece nowadays:
1. If I like the way something is written, as written,
I will play it as close to that as possibe
and with phrasing such that I can bring out the beauty there / what I hear as beautiful, as much as a possible,
and build it up so the public can appreciate it too;
2. If I don't like the way something is written,
I may change it,
or if, as in some small-town / untutored rags, I can't figure out how to get a certain part to 'make musical sense' to me, I may omit it and just play the other themes, or make a medley of the tune by combining it with another tune;
AND, most pertinent to your comment
3. If a tune does not have repeats, BUT has really great themes that I would love to repeat over and over, then I will take the time to come up with what I hope is a good turn-around phrase (first ending) so that I can repeat that theme...
sometimes if a theme is outstanding, I may repeat it as many as four or five times in a performance... maybe with variations, because I like it so much.
By contrast, if there's a theme of a piece I'm asked to play, that I really DON'T like... I may only play it once, and skip the repeat, so I don't play it even worse the second time.
This latter only really goes for tunes I'm ASKED/PAID to play, not ones I choose myself.
Hope that helps!
@@andrewbarrett1537 I think ragtime works best when you don't overthink it, but also don't undermine the intent of the piece. When you have a middle ground between fun and following the script. I alluded to this in another comment using Cottontail Rag as an example: it is incredibly beautiful, but in order to express the full beauty of the piece you pretty much have to play it slower. However I think Cottontail Rag can also benefit from improvisation; adding grace notes and the like can help bring out the piece's beauty even more. Obviously this is just one example, and Cottontail was very clearly written to be more "graceful" than most other rags. I'm no expert either way, this is just based on what I've picked up by listening to different interpretations of various rags.
Btw, Andrew, big fan. Loved your sight reading of the Super Mario Land 2 theme, even if you claimed it "sucked" in the comments :P
Also, to the original commenter: I notice this a lot with Sensation by Joseph Lamb too, where some people play the final strain twice while some opt to play it only once. I'm not sure how it's actually written, but it basically boils down to personal preference. I think the strain has a sort of "outro" feel to it, so for me, I prefer it played only once. But that's just me.
Dr. Sleepy It was written that way.
What is the deal with the drumming.
It's part of the performance, though both musicians weren't in the shot.