By the age of eleven, he had composed over two dozen pieces. When Brier was four, his parents bought him a player piano, and the next year he began taking piano lessons with a local teacher. $90 full weekend pass.Tom Brier was born in October 1971 in Oakdale, California, an agricultural society in the Central Valley south of Sacramento. Tickets: $25 advance $30 at the door for Saturday and Sunday Kuumbwa concerts. Venues include Calvary Episcopal Church, the Calvary Parish Hall, the Santa Cruz Vet’s Hall (for dance show), the Museum of Art & History (for seminars), Lupulo Craft Beer House, and Kuumbwa Jazz Center. ![]() Where: Eight venues around downtown Santa Cruz, including sidewalk performances on Pacific Avenue. When: Saturday and Sunday, with showcase concerts at 7 p.m. I’m hoping here in Santa Cruz we can change that.” “But we’re not seeing many young people as attendees. “Young musicians are really getting into it,” said DeGhetaldi of ragtime. Ironically, considering his connection with the Calvary Church, it was Santa Cruz’s churches that were behind the ban, he said.Īmong the musicians visiting this weekend at the festival – the music starts Saturday morning and continues on into Sunday evening – is well-known (in ragtime circles) composer and performer Tom Brier, even more famous composer David Thomas Roberts, historian and pianist Adam Swanson, boogie-woogie piano player Sonny Leyland and 15-year-old prodigy Ramona Baker who, said DeGhetaldi, doesn’t play anything written after 1910. DeGhetaldi unearthed a Santa Cruz city ordinance from 1912 that banned ragtime dancing. The headquarters for the festival will be the Calvary Episcopal Church in downtown Santa Cruz, where DeGhetaldi works as the church organist. Other events, including two concerts at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center and a dance show at the Santa Cruz Vet’s Hall, will require a festival pass. Some shows, such as on Pacific Avenue and at the downtown brew pub Lupulo, will be free. The festival will have about 17 or 18 individual musicians, plus a 10-member ragtime orchestra. Ragtime has a fervent following across the country for its uniquely “ragged” rhythms, and his contacts from other festivals have given him the muscle to bring in some well-regarded musicians in the genre. “(Ragtime) was a nice place where I could feel comfortable and unique.” “I found myself loving the structure of classical music and also the freedom and ear learning of jazz, but didn’t really feel I wanted to be confined by either of them,” said, DeGhetaldi, 30, who has a YouTube channel devoted to ragtime and stride piano. When other young pianists were gravitating either to classical or jazz, DeGhetaldi found himself embracing ragtime as a satisfying middle path. ![]() ![]() ![]() The young pianist loved the challenge of “stride piano,” the ragtime piano style popularized by the great Fats Waller. He picked up the piano at a young age and he was around 9 or 10 when he discovered his father’s collection of sheet music from African-American composer Scott Joplin, ragtime’s most important innovator and popularizer. It is a key evolutionary step toward the development of American jazz in the 1920s.ĭeGhetaldi discovered ragtime as a child. Ragtime is a specific genre of American music that had its heyday in the first two decades of the 20th century, a blend of polyrhythmic African American folk music of the 19th century and the more European-flavored marches of composers like John Philip Sousa. “I know all these musicians,” said DeGhetaldi, “and I saw how this sort of thing was done elsewhere, so I figured I could do this here in my hometown.”
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