06:40:46 am 
CDs: Delight in a Travel Back in Time with New World Records
Categories: UncategorizedYesterday, critics on both coasts are talking about how the new musical Minsky's can transport audiences back to the first part of the 20th century. Today, I'd like to take up their lead and briefly discuss a trio of discs from New World Records that can take music theater lovers even further back in time to the dawn of the 20th century. This trio of discs features The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra under the direction of Rick Benjamin, and either singly, or better yet, as a collection, they open a door to a sound that is both somehow familiar and also marvelously refreshing.
The newest of the discs is George M. Cohan – You're a Grand Old Flag, and it features the orchestra, along with vocalists Colin Pritchard and Bernadette Boerckel, delivering over a dozen of Cohan's tunes. On the familiar side here, "Flag" contains such perennial favorites as "Mary's a Grand Old Name," "Give My Regards to Broadway" and ""Over There." The disc also contains songs that have disappeared from consciousness like "The Eyes of Youth See the Truth" (from The Cohan Review of 1918) and the ragtime incidental music from Popularity, a show from 1906. The disc is rounded out with one track featuring Cohan himself. He's not performing any of his music, but rather, he's delivering a speech, and in it, there is some terrific insight into the man, his stagecraft and the body of work that he created.
This final track alone might be worth the price of the disc, but really, each track is a little gem – a way for listeners to retreat nearly a 100 years (and in cases like "Popularity" even more. The orchestra has attempted to recreate the pit sound that audiences might have heard when these songs were first performed, and for anyone, like me, who's grown up on the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy or the musical George M! and the bombast Cohan's music gets in these two biographical treatments, "Flag" is a complete surprise. There is a delicacy to the music, even an airiness. Maybe that's because there's an even balance of strings and brass in the orchestra, or maybe it's the presence of the piccolo and bells. Whatever the reason, the impishness and the youthful exuberance that's heard on "Flag" is absolutely captivating – as are the thorough liner notes, which cover not only Cohan's biography and include information about each of the songs, but also some fascinating historical insight into the sound that makes this disc so unique…and invaluable.
Equally delectable for ear are two earlier releases from New World Records and The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra are Black Manhattan: Theatre and Dance Music of James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and Members of the Legendary Clef Club and From Barrelhouse to Broadway: The Musical Odyssey of Joe Jordan. On these two discs, you'll find a wealth of ragtime music jauntily springing to life anew nearly a century after it was first heard. To name favorites on either of the discs would probably be meaningless, since most of the titles on these two discs would be as unfamiliar to readers as they were to me. What's astounding on both discs is how eminently enjoyable the music is, and how diverse the sound of the era can be. (It doesn't all sound like Scott Joplin!).
As with the Cohan disc, the liner notes deftly explore an era and slice of music history that has widely become forgotten. For instance, who knew that before the Harlem Renaissance, a small stretch of West 53rd Street was home to many of the pre-eminent black composers and performers of the early 20th century?
I really cannot say enough about how much I've enjoyed these three discs, and I'm betting that most music theater lovers will too.
---- Andy Propst
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