What is the difference between jazz and ragtime? I was listening to a 1914 recording of Europe’s Society Orchestra playing their “Castle House Rag,” and damned if it didn’t sound a lot like “Livery Stable Blues.” Is jazz more “performance” music and ragtime “dance” music?
They both began in the late 1800s; both seems melded from black American music and Eastern European klezmer. Jazz is still going, but ragtime seems to have blended into show and pop music by the mid-1920s. Any music historians here can shed some more light on their origins and how they differed?
Black Leaders: Texans for Their Times; Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas; Polignac’s Texas Brigade; Reconstruction to Reform; doesn’t sound like the same author.
The quick-and-dirty answer is that rags were written out and meant by the composer to be played as written, while one of the defining characteristics of jazz is improvisation–no improvisation, no jazz. There’s not much improvisation in the Europe sides, so it’s not jazz. (Or so I’ve read; I’m no expert on this stuff myself.)
Another specific reason is that that Reese’s band used a lot of unison voicings (the instruments all playing exactly the same melodic line) while one of the defining qualities of early jazz is that the lead instruments play different lines.
As for what happened to ragtime, think of it as being analogous to disco in the '70s; like disco, it was massively popular for a while. Like disco, its mass popularity was followed by a period where the genre was considered uncool and out-of-date. Like disco, its influence never really disappeared, it just transmogrified into different things (modern forms of dance music in the case of disco; jazz and popular song in the case of ragtime.)
Hmmm, interesting; thanks. Another difference I’ve noted is that you can dance to ragtime: indeed, many ragtime songs were also dances (The Grizzley Bear, the Castle Walk, etc.). But one doesn’t dance to jazz (swing, yeah, but that’s another whole topic).
Early jazz was popular dance music. Remember, it came from the dancehalls and brothels of New Orleans! Its improvisational nature gave jazz one big advantage over ragtime on the dance floor. If the dancers got into a groove, the jazz band could just improvise and keep going, while a ragtime band was limited by the arrangement; you get to the last page and you’re done. (Later, the swing big bands would perfect the head arrangement to get around this problem.)
And there was all sorts of ragtime that wasn’t supposed to be to be danced to – Joplin rags, for example, were meant for playing and listening, not the dance floor. And don’t forget that one of the major branches of ragtime was the piano rag, where the emphasis was more on showing off the player’s piano skills than maintaining a dance beat.
FWIW, ragtime did go through a brief revival in the 40’s with the Lu Watters Band in San Francisco. Watters wrote some pretty good piano rags in his day.
I love to play ragtime piano, mostly the “classic” type - Joplin, Lamb, Scott. I’d back up what Wumpus said. Ragtime is a compositional music, whereas Jazz is a performance music.
Improvisation is the soul of Jazz, but with ragtime, the beauty is in bringing out the song that the composer intended.
Ragtime is characterized by a syncopated melody played over a rhythmic bass line. It has sections that are often repeated in a characteristic pattern. With Jazz, you might hear the melody once, then the performance takes off in any direction, only occasionally returning to fragments of that melody.
In some dictionaries, you’ll see ragtime defined as a “style of jazz” but I don’t think that’s accurate. I think that if you went back to 1899 and asked someone to play some jazz, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.
What do you mean by that? No jazz in Europe?
Ermm… What kind of jazz? Newer or older? From Django Reinhardt to hmm… current Polish and Norwegian jazz - there is a lot of jazz.
You might want to read a bit more, because this seemed like a non sequitur jab. Sorry, if I read you wrong.
On subject, though, you’re right - if I remember correctly, Scott Joplin for instance wanted people to follow the note and tempo while playing his rags… er… ragtime compositions… things…
