Terry Waldo - The Soul of Ragtime (2014)

Ragtime. The word itself evokes images of corny movies, bad record covers, overblown caricatures with baggy pants, cigars, funny hats, and those elastic bands around the sleeves.

Forget that.

Tompkins Square has released music across many genres : Folk, gospel, jazz, blues, old-timey, British pop, American Primitive, Cajun, Greek, singer/songwriters. But this is the first Ragtime album released by the label, from perhaps the most important living artist in the genre, Terry Waldo.

Terry's new album 'The Soul of Ragtime' is the culmination of decades of performance and study. Ragtime is one of America's truly unique and precious art forms. Comprised of original and traditional tunes, the album is stylistically so varied that to simply label it "Ragtime" is nonsensical. At times dissonant, rollicking, spacey, gospel-influenced and complex, "The Soul of Ragtime" celebrates tradition but moves the entire enterprise forward in surprising ways.

Terry Waldo has literally written the book on Ragtime. 'This Is Ragtime' is a definite history of the music, originally published in 1976, with a new version published in 2009 by Jazz At Lincoln Center, forward by Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis says about Waldo, "What he's done for Ragtime - in terms of the integrity of the approach, and the knowledgeable approach, and the playing of it - is the greatest service that can be done for any art."