Search - The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra, Rick Benjamin, Janai Brugger :: Black Manhattan, Vol. 3

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. I started thinking through the possibilities for such a project in 1996, collecting music and texts and beginning an (ongoing) odyssey through thousands of microfilmed pages of historic black newspapers. I also initiated regular performances of this repertoire in concerts around the country with my Paragon Ragtime Orchestra (PRO). Three years later it seemed I had enough material, knowledge, and experience to pitch "Black Manhattan" as an album concept. I made the rounds of the recording companies without initial success. Eventually and happily however, in 2003 New World Records decided to take on the project. 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 is magnificent music and the gifted, spirited, and persevering people who gave it to us.    - Rick Benjamin, conductor, Paragon Ragtime Orchestra