Eccentric Flower:200911/Pork and Beans
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Pork and Beans
Sue Keller performs it pretty much the way you'd get it from the sheet music. Note that the C section, my favorite bit (Perfessor Bill describes it as "the musical equivalent of stretching a rubber band and letting it snap") is pretty distinct from the other sections.
Jim Hession, whose work I normally love, sort of overkills this one and all the sections run together.
But listen to Luckey Roberts himself performing it in a 1945 recording!
I guess if it's your piece you have license to mess with it any way you want. After all, Eubie Blake never played "Tricky Fingers" the same way twice. And by 1945, Roberts was probably varying this piece every which way just to keep from falling asleep at the piano. (He wrote it in 1913.)
P.S. Wanna see why "Tricky Fingers" is tricky? Watch Jim Hession's left hand.
P.P.S. I bet you thought I was going to link this.
If you search for "Pork and Beans" on YouTube you will get about seven pages of Weezer or riffs on the Weezer song before you ever see any ragtime. It's a pretty good Weezer song; it's a reasonably brilliant video. It's not my favorite Weezer song of all time, mind you; that would be "Buddy Holly," which has an absolutely brilliant Spike Jonze video, which unfortunately Rivers Cuomo hated (because he is an ass).
-- 01:08, 24 November 2009 (GMT)
Well, there, see? I would never have searched for Pork and Beans on YouTube, because I didn't know about Roberts, et al. And, um, who exactly is Weezer and why should I know of him/them? What decade are we talking here, and maybe I can figure out why I've never heard of Weezer. You've gone so deeply esoteric on me here, with Spike Jonze and Rivers Cuomo, that I guess I'll have to hit the figurative books.
-- 01:26, 24 November 2009 (GMT)
Weezer are actively recording now and are on about their fifth album, so that's your decade. Spike Jonze (not to be confused with the bandleader) is an intermittently brilliant director; before he made movies he made music videos, among other things. Rivers Cuomo is the lead singer and predominant songwriter of Weezer. Wikipedia will yield anything else you want to know.
-- 01:30, 24 November 2009 (GMT)
Mel:
The Hessions version of Pork & Beans is more like what I've heard in the past, although if it was him I heard, I didn't know his name. (And I knew who Weezer was, because I sometimes listen to the kind of radio station that plays them, but I would have had to look Rivers Cuomo up, myself. I rarely know band-members names.)
I find that super-offbeat ragtime like that last piece sort of disturbing to listen to. I guess that's supposed to be the point, in a way.
(Also, I'm over here listening to ragtime because WoW won't let me back in. I think it must be WoW and not just me, because everything else is working!)
-- 03:07, 24 November 2009 (GMT)
Bunny42:
Ah, my kind of post. You continually introduce me to new things. I was not familiar with Pork and Beans before now. Didn't care much for the Hession rendition. He's too flamboyant. Reminds me of Virgil Fox playing Bach, complete with rhinestones on his heels. Roberts was all over the place, but not as gratuitously showy. Funny, I generally don't think of ragtime as being in a minor key. The middle section does go major for a bit, but there we are, back to minor.
I liked the way Hession would take his left hand off of the keyboard, almost rest it on his knee, from time to time. Fun to watch.
Weezer??? Seriously?
-- 23:42, 23 November 2009 (GMT)