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Biographies

Clarke Buehling and the SkirtLifters
Frank French
Hal Isbitz
Brian Keenan

Scott Kirby

Morten Gunnar Larsen
Mont Alto
Max Morath
Morris S. Palter
David Thomas Roberts

Jack Rummel

Trebor Tichenor

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For good, spirited, old-time American string band music, Clarke Buehling
and the SkirtLifters beat all comers hands down. Whether it is Civil
War jigs and reels or Gay 90s, they do it all with enthusiasm and good
humor. Pieces are thoughtfully arranged and performance styles carefully
considered. They have drawn encores and accolades from Savannah to
Minneapolis, and have brought young and old alike onto the dance floor
in many a one-horse town. The ladies can be assured no offensive material
will ever find its way into their program. SkirtLifters is a term referring to
the ladies’ costumes in the dancing that goes with late 19th century
music. On the riverboats and minstrel stages and under the big top
emerged a blend of African and Anglo-Celtic musical cultures. Clarke
Buehling and the SkirtLifters have meticulously researched the style,
music, and humor of those times, evoking another genre of American
music. Their repertoire includes rags, marches, galops, jigs, reels, and
old-time songs. The program reflects their interest in the origins of
American popular music. With lively banjo – enormously popular in social
settings then – plus mandolin, guitar, and violin, the SkirtLifters’ expertly
arranged tunes and minstrel songs add another color to the Rocky
Mountain Ragtime Festival.
Clarke Buehling: banjo and vocals
Widely recognized for his interpretations of late 19th century, classic
finger-style banjo, Clarke is also in the forefront of the recent resurgence
of interest in the earlier minstrel banjo style. Much of the material of the
SkirtLifters is based around Clarke’s collection of 19th century banjo and
mandolin instruction books and sheet music. Clarke teaches banjo, fiddle,
mandolin, and guitar in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Thom Howard: guitar
Thom has a Bachelor of Music from Nebraska Wesleyan University,
specializing in Spanish and Latin fingerstyle guitar. He has taught classical
guitar at the University of Missouri at Columbia and pursues music as a
profession.
Tom Verdot: violin, banjo
Tom makes and repairs violins in Columbia, Missouri. He especially enjoys
re-creating vernacular music from the 18th century through the Civil
War period.

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How does one categorize a musician immersed in European Classical
traditions from the time of Bach to the 20th century, but also intensely
responsive to the music of New Orleans, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and
Brazil? Frank French answers the riddle by synthesizing all these various
styles into his own formulation as a pianist and composer. Although it
might seem obvious that anyone born to the Rhythm and Blues of
the 1950s, growing up in San Francisco’s Haight- Ashbury district,
and studying the classics at the Conservatory of Music would likely
enough emerge with such an artistic makeup, it is not as though there
are no other historical parallels or models for this kind of musical life.
In earlier times the great American musical pioneer, Louis Moreau
Gottschalk, successfully connected the musical traditions of Europe and
Africa in his most important piano compositions dating from the 1850s.
It was no accident that Frank French discovered a musical affinity for
Gottschalk and became a premier interpreter of his music. In his unique
one-man presentation of Gottschalk’s life and music, French weaves
musical selections with the composer’s diary to paint a vivid picture in
historical context. With Gottschalk begins this saga of music making,
composing, and identifying continuing tradition and legacy that is truly
Pan-American in its scope and outlook.
The use of the pianoforte in the way espoused by French implies a
distinctive musical territory placing the sound of the Western Hemisphere
properly in the larger context of World Music. In this realm the musical
imagination revolves around the piano, which may be coaxed like a
harp in one moment and beaten like a drum in the next. Here is expressed
the contrast of genteel Romanticism and the savage emotive provoked
in a more rugged way of life. Thus is the artistic sentiment projected
onto a landscape of rough and ready ways and means. Manifest in this
is the dynamic attraction of spirit to earth.
Over the past 20 years Frank French has performed and recorded this
music in community concerts and educational venues, on radio and
television. He has criss-crossed the globe from Europe to North America,
to Australia, performing at numerous international music festivals in
France, Finland, Germany, and throughout North America and Oceana,
from the Maine coast to the Gold Coast, from Toronto to Santiago de
Cuba. His music speaks a language larger than life through his many
performances and recordings. Performing on viola with Frank
is his niece, Nell French, a native of California, who has
been performing as a solo violist, chamber musician, and
orchestral player since the age of 12. Today she maintains an
active performing career throughout the United States and in
Europe. She holds a Bachelor of Music cum laude from the University 
of Colorado at Boulder, a Master of Music from the University of Missouri at
Kansas City, and a Fine Arts Award in viola from the Interlochen Arts
Academy. She has studied under such internationally renowned artists
as David Holland, Erika Eckert, Barbara Hamilton, and Paul Coletti. Miss
French currently lives in the Kansas City area and is very pleased to be a
part of the 2004 Rocky Mountain Ragtime Festival.
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Hal Isbitz was born in 1931. He grew up in Los Angeles and is a resident
of Santa Barbara, California. Hal is a retired computer programmer and
classically trained musician. He started writing ragtime in the mid-70s,
being mainly influenced by the ragtime compositions of Scott Joplin and
Joseph Lamb, American popular music, and the works of the Romantics,
such as Chopin and Rachmaninov. Inspired by such pieces as Joplin’s
“Solace” and Artie Matthews’ “Pastime Rag No. 5,” he began writing
Latin American pieces in the early 1980s. In 1987, he became acquainted
with the Brazilian tangos of Ernesto Nazareth, whose works exerted a
strong influence in the creation of works employing the idioms of Latin
America. To date he has written some 65 pieces. Hal was awarded second
prize for his rag “Lazy Susan” in the 1997 Scott Joplin Foundation Ragtime
Composition Contest.

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Brian Keenan is a major Minnesota composer and performer of ragtime
and related music of the past and present. Born in St. Paul, he began
taking piano lessons at age ten and started playing and composing
classic ragtime shortly thereafter. Brian was introduced to the world of
New Ragtime when he met Frank French, David Thomas Roberts, and
Jack Rummel in 1991. In 1994, he graduated with honors from the
University of Colorado at Boulder, where he studied composition, piano,
and harpsichord and was a member of the school’s Early Music and
Electronic Music ensembles. Brian has been a featured performer
at the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri; the Rocky
Mountain Ragtime Festival in Boulder, Colorado; the West Coast Ragtime
Festival in Sacramento, California; the Classic Ragtime Festival in
Indianapolis, Indiana; and the Lake Superior Ragtime Festival in Superior,
Wisconsin.
Brian has also performed for several community theatre productions in
the Twin Cities and composed the title song for Woodbury Community
Theater’s “The Magic of Christmas” in 2002.
In 2000, Brian presented his compositions on the program “The Wave
Project” on KFAI-FM in Minneapolis. Brian’s recording of Trebor Tichenor’s
“Deep in the Ozarks” was used by Garrison Keillor on a Mark Twain
audiobook in 2001. Another career highlight was a 2004 appearance on
Backstage Pass, a weekly arts magazine on Twin Cities public radio.
Brian’s CD releases – comprising Folk Ragtime, New Ragtime, and Terra
Verde – include Solo Piano (1996, Solo Art), Hidden Falls (1998, Viridiana),
River Bluffs (2000, Viridiana), and Traditions (2001). In addition, his
compositions have been recorded by David Thomas Roberts on Solo
Art and Viridiana releases.
This is Brian Keenan’s eighth appearance at the Rocky Mountain
Ragtime Festival.
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Pianist/composer Scott Kirby, Festival musical director, specializes in distinctly
American musical styles which include Classic Ragtime, New Ragtime, Creole Music, and
Terra Verde. As a performer, he is also an educator, providing historical context and
musical insight into the program as it unfolds. Whether on the concert stage or
in the classroom, Kirby offers a musical experience which is both informative and
intimate, educational yet highly personal. Each presentation is unique and may include
examples from North America, South America, and the Caribbean, illuminating how
a rich musical heritage evolved from a melange of ethnic music and “art music,” 
from the aural and the composed traditions. Such composers include Louis Moreau
Gottschalk, Scott Joplin, Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth, jazz
pioneer Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, and Ernesto Lecuona of Cuba.
Concerts may also contain short pieces from Latin America and the French
Caribbean such as the Haitian merengue, the biguine from Martinique,
the Puerto Rican danza, the cumbia, or the Cuban habanera. In addition,
Kirby champions writers of New Ragtime and Terra Verde, contemporary
counterparts to the more traditional styles. As a composer, Kirby combines
the influence of nineteenth century romanticism with these New World
idioms into his own individual, syncopated language.
A native of Ohio, Scott Kirby began his study of music at the age of six
and continued formal piano instruction for seventeen years. He worked
under Robert Howat of Wittenburg University of Ohio and Sylvia
Zaremba at Ohio State University. After obtaining an English degree from
Ohio State University, Kirby moved to New Orleans and began his
professional music career. In the following four years, he recorded the
complete rags of Scott Joplin and made his debut at all of the major
ragtime festivals in the United States, as well as festivals in Belgium, France,
Norway, and Hungary.
Kirby now divides his time between performance and composition and is
available for concert appearances, workshops, residencies, and festivals.
He has served as musical director of the Scott Joplin Festival in Sedalia,
Missouri. Scott Kirby helped found the Ragtime Institute and has
performed at every Rocky Mountain Ragtime Festival since its inception
in 1992. This is his sixth year as the musical director.
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Pianist, composer, and arranger, Morten Gunnar Larsen, was
born in Oslo, Norway, in October 1955. He began piano lessons at
age five and graduated from the Norwegian Academy of Music in
1978, specializing in the fields of classical ragtime and early jazz piano with
an emphasis on the music of Scott Joplin, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll”
Morton, Eubie Blake, and Louis M. Gottschalk, as well as contemporary
ragtime composers. He has also focused his attention on the piano
music of the Caribbean and South America in addition to his own
material. Although mainly known in the field of ragtime and early jazz, he has 
also been a featured soloist in performances of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Morten recorded his first solo album in 1975, which received the prestigious
“Spellemannsprisen” award (the Norwegian Grammy). He has made
numerous appearances on Norwegian television and radio and has
performed both solo and as guest performer with several jazz groups. In
1977, he founded his own orchestra, the 10-member Ophelia Ragtime
Orchestra. He also plays with the Oslo Magnolia Jazz Band, was a guest
performer on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, and played a
solo command performance for Norway’s King Harald on the occasion of
Her Majesty, Princess Ragnhild’s birthday.
Morten has created several musical programs such as Memories
of Eubie based on Eubie Blake’s music, One Mo’ Time — an
off-Broadway hit musical which toured a number of U.S. cities for two
years before going on to Brazil and Sweden; excerpts from Scott Joplin’s
opera, Treemonisha, featuring a choir and soloists; and a portrait of Jelly
Roll Morton entitled Jelly Roll! The Music and the Man with
the American actor/playwright Vernel Bagneris during the Oslo Jazz Festival
in 1990. Following an engagement at the New York jazz club
Michael’s Pub, this show played a highly successful Off-Broadway run for
11 months during the 1994-95 season. In 1997, the show played in
London’s Theatre Royal Stratford East, and also toured in the United
States. Critically acclaimed, Jelly Roll! received two Off-Broadway awards,
and Morten received an “OBIE” award for his role as piano soloist and
musical arranger/director. In 1998, he recorded the show in Washington,
DC, for the Library of Congress archives in the very same hall in which
Jelly Roll Morton gave his famous interviews in 1938.
In 1993, Morten received the annual “BUDDY” award from the Norwegian
Jazz Federation as jazz musician of the year. During the summer of 1995,
he toured with the Ophelia Ragtime Orchestra to the United States —
New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, and the annual Scott
Joplin Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri. The group also made a CD for
GHB/Jazzology, released in 1997. Morten has recorded eight solo piano
CDs and three ensemble albums with the Ophelia Orchestra. His recent
solo recording, Fingerbreaker, has received outstanding reviews since it
was released internationally on the Decca label in 1998. In 1999, the
Orchestra was again enthusiastically received in a 24-day tour of the
United States.
This is Morten’s third appearance at the Rocky Mountain Ragtime
Festival.
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The Mont Alto Ragtime and Tango Orchestra was founded in 1990
by pianist Rodney Sauer and specializes in the dance and theater music
of the ragtime era. The orchestra plays for dancers, using both authentic
and new orchestrations. The orchestra also plays for silent films and has
toured the country with their film score presentations. They have created
and recorded sound tracks for video releases of several silent films
(using some ragtime, of course). The orchestra plays both famous ragtime
hits and delightful obscurities and is not ashamed to leave the mainstream
paths of ragtime and venture into neglected waltzes, early tangos,
fox-trots, one-steps, parlor songs, 6/8 marches, and the half-and-half
waltz (in 5/4 time).
The musicians are Susan Hall on violin, Kevin Johnson on cello, Brian
Collins on clarinet, Mark Hyams on trumpet, soprano Susan Rogers,
and pianist and director Rodney Sauer. They have performed at every
Rocky Mountain Ragtime Festival.
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Max Morath is a performer who for years has occupied a unique
space as an entertainer/spokesman for American life and music. His new
show, “Ragtime and Again,” premiered with an acclaimed six-week
run at the York Theatre in New York City and is now booking performances
nationally. His first  one-man theatrical “Turn of the Century”
spearheaded the ragtime revival of the 1970s, playing Off-Broadway for
a full season. It was followed by the equally successful properties,
“The Ragtime Years” and “Living a Ragtime Life,” each a mixture of Max,
music, and Americana which toured nationally, following opening runs in
New York and at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., which were cheered
by the critics. On tour he has performed over 3,000 engagements at
theaters, colleges, and community concerts in the United States and
Canada as a solo artist, with his quintet, and with various orchestras.
In June of 2003, Max appeared at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York
with William Bolcom and Joan Morris in a series of concert performances
of songs by the legendary lyricist E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, released on CD by
Original Cast Recordings. His many solo recordings are with Vanguard,
Epic, and SoloArt. His new musical revue “Trust Everybody . . . But Cut
the Cards,” with original music and lyrics and based on the Mister Dooley
essays of the journalist Finley Peter Dunne, was presented in staged
readings last year in New York and is being prepared for full production.
Max is a native of Colorado Springs and worked his way through Colorado
College as a radio announcer and jazz sideman, graduating with a BA in
English. A variety of jobs followed: actor, salesman, writer, pianist, and
television director. Performing at melodrama theaters in the gold camps
and ghost towns of the West, he developed an ongoing fascination with
ragtime and musical theater, and the colorful America that spawned
them. Graduate studies at Stanford’s NBC Radio & Television Institute
sharpened his media skills, and in the early 1960s, for PBS (then
NET), Max wrote and performed twenty-six half-hour programs
about Tin Pan Alley and ragtime music that are now considered
definitive. He continues to appear often in public broadcasting,
most recently with Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” and the
Wynton Marsalis series “Making the Music” on NPR.
He was commissioned to write The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to
Popular Standards (Putnam/Perigee, 2002) and has appeared on many
specials for PBS, including “American Experience: 1900” and “Yours for a
Song,” a retrospective on women composers of American Popular Music.
Max earned a Master’s degree in American Studies at Columbia University
in 1996. His thesis explores the life and work of the early 20th century
American composer and publisher Carrie Jacobs-Bond, whose works
include the perennial favorites “I Love You Truly” and “The End of a
Perfect Day.”
Max and his wife, photographer Diane Fay Skomars, recently published
The Road to Ragtime (Donning, 1999), a colorful depiction in photographs
and text of the Ragtime Man on the road in the America of today. They
maintain a studio in New York and a residence in Minnesota, where Diane
is an administrator at the University of Minnesota – Duluth.
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Born in Canada, Morris S. Palter has performed in the Acousmania
Festival in Bucharest, the Agora Festival (IRCAM), the Holland
Festival, the Musik III Festival in San Diego, the Green Umbrella concert
series (LA Philharmonic), and at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall
under famed conductor/composer Pierre Boulez. He has also performed
as a soloist in the Amsterdam Percussion Festival and performed
xylophone master classes at the Royal Conservatory, the Hague, and
at the Rotterdam Conservatory. He was a guest artist at the Banff Centre
for the Performing Arts. Morris is a founding member of NOISE (San
Diego New Music) and is also a member of redfish blue fish.
Morris actively commissions both solo and chamber works and has
collaborated with artists such as Steve Schick, Bob Becker, Pierre Boulez,
Roger Reynolds, David Lang, Stewart Saunders Smith, Chris Tonkin,
Derek Keller, and Mathew Burtner.
Morris currently has endorsement contracts with Black Swamp
Percussion, Ayotte Drums, and Paiste Inc., and he is an Associate in
Music at the University of California, San Diego.
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David Thomas Roberts —composer-pianist, writer, and visual
artist — has been hailed by many as New Ragtime’s leading figure.
Born in Moss Point, Mississippi, in 1955, he was composing, painting,
and writing stories by age eight. He wrote his first rag in 1971, at which
time he was especially interested in the music of Erik Satie, Scott Joplin,
Charles Ives, and Alexander Scriabin, whose work he
encountered and studied independently of any teacher. Since
then he has composed over 85 ragtime-related piano pieces
while continuing to work in a variety of other musical languages.
In his early twenties, David wrote some of the piano pieces for which he
is best-known. His poetry was first published at that time. His first recording,
Music For a Pretty Baby, appeared in 1978. By 1984, two albums devoted
entirely to his own compositions were internationally available. Pieces such
as The Early Life of Larry Hoffer, Roberto Clemente, Pinelands Memoir,
Through the Bottomlands, and the eclectic suite, New Orleans Streets,
led many writers to hail Roberts as the leading contemporary ragtimebased
composer. The New Orleans historian Al Rose called him “the most
important composer of this half of the century in America.”
David is the author of entries in The New Grove Dictionary of American
Music and is listed in The International Who’s Who in Music. He founded
and edited The Streetfighting Aesthete, a journal of surrealist expression
and experimental writing. His poetry appears in many U.S. small press
periodicals, and his paintings were recently featured in the British magazine
of visionary art, Raw Vision, while his music has been played on National
Public Radio. He currently divides his time between California and Missouri.
David has performed at every Rocky Mountain Ragtime Festival since its
beginning in 1992.
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Jack Rummel, Festival president, was born in Tacoma, Washington. He
took his early lessons from a neighborhood children’s piano
teacher and later studied the rudiments of popular musical stylings
from a local Tacoma bandleader. He became aware of ragtime in the 1950s
due to some early 45 rpm records by Joe “Fingers” Carr and Crazy Otto, but
did not pursue its serious study until the 1970s when he was awakened to
the classic rags of Scott Joplin and others through the recordings of
Joshua Rifkin and Max Morath. Since then Jack has embraced ragtime as an avocation, 
starting with folio and record collecting, beginning composition in 1979, hosting a
weekly radio program (KGNU’s Ragtime America) since 1980, writing
articles and reviews for ragtime publications, and performing at various
festivals in St. Louis, Missouri; Central City and Evergreen, Colorado; and
Fresno and Sacramento, California. His four recordings ( Back to Ragtime,
Lone Jack, Brun’s Boys, and A Contemporary Ragtime Sampler) and
three published folios of original compositions have put him in the forefront
of ragtime composers now living. He plays five-string banjo in a bluegrass
band and practiced dentistry in Boulder for over thirty years before recently
retiring.
Jack is one of the original founders of the Rocky Mountain Ragtime Festival.
As a pianist at his beloved Steinway and a banjo and harp guitar player in the Etcetera
String Band, Special Guest Bob Ault exudes the joy of music. He is a ragtime
composer and a church organist and has entertained everywhere from Carnegie Hall
to Japan. He has served on the board of directors of the Scott Joplin Foundation in
Sedalia, Missouri. Bob has studied thousands of vintage recordings and plays in a style
based on the work of early ragtime musicians.
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Pianist, composer, collector, writer, and scholar, Trebor Tichenor is a
native of St. Louis, Missouri. He was privately tutored in music, beginning
on piano at the age of five. He discovered ragtime at
age 13 through the recordings of Joe “Fingers” Carr. He began performing
professionally in 1960 and co-founded the St. Louis Ragtimers in 1961.
In the early 1960s, Trebor published – with the late Russ Cassidy – a
quarterly The Ragtime Review. His writings on ragtime have appeared in
all the major journals devoted to the music.
Trebor is one of the handful of elite who have received the Scott Joplin
Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Scott Joplin Foundation in
Sedalia, Missouri, for extraordinary contributions to the field of ragtime.
He is a thoroughly seasoned ragtime pianist, a world class collector of
ragtime sheet music and piano rolls, a major recording artist specializing
in folk ragtime, editor of Ragtime Rarities and Ragtime Rediscoveries,
and co-author of Rags and Ragtime.
Trebor hosted a weekly radio show Ragophile on station KWMU-FM for
15 years and has been teaching a ragtime history course at Washington
University in Saint Louis for over 25 years.
Trebor currently has three solo CDs in print: Tempus Ragorum, Those
Southern Blues, and his latest, Wild Flower Rag. He also has published a
folio of his original works, Tempus Ragorum, which contains all his originals
from his recording of the same name.
 

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