Saturday Jazz Performance - Max Keenlyside plays "Maple Leaf Rag"

This week for the Saturday Jazz Performance lets have a little fun! Since it is the first Saturday of the month I'm focusing on a jazz piano performance. Now, I've heard of two pianos being played together, but not by the same pianist!

This week Canadian Max Keenlyside performs Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, on two pianos at once.

Scott Joplin

Maple Leaf Rag was one of the great ragtime composer Scott Joplin's early works. It was copyrighted on September 8, 1899. It became a sensation and the model for most ragtime compositions afterwards. Over the nest twenty years Joplin wrote about four dozen ragtime piano compositions. The Maple Leaf Rag outsold every other musical piece that John Stark published and Joplin survived on the royalties from it until he died in 1917.

Max Keenlyside is a piano player and composer. He travels the world playing at festivals and has built up a reputation as an excellent performer and composer. In 2009 he represented Prince Edward Island in the National Artist’s Program and completed a thirty-five minute symphony for an orchestrain 2014.

Here he plays the Maple Leaf Rag just for fun on two pianos in 2014.

 

 

Here is a 2013 Keenlyside video performance where he plays more seriously demonstrating Stride piano by playing four tunes Snowy Morning Blues and Carolina Shout both composed by James P. Johnson and Keep Your Temper and Echoes of Spring by Willie "The Lion" Smith.