Reginald R. Robinson

Reginald R. Robinson (* 19th October 1972 in Chicago ) is an American ragtime - pianist .

Life

Robinson was born as one of six children in a family that had to assert itself in a violent environment, so several of his classmates were shot during his school days (his mother accompanied her children to school until they were teenagers) and the family's home was broken into several times . He first encountered ragtime when Scott Joplin's classic The Entertainer was performed during a special performance at his school as part of a more general musical program . Robinson had previously only known the piece from ice cream trucks and on this occasion heard it for the first time in a serious context. He now began to study intensively with the ragtime and received first by his mother, a Casio - Keyboard given, later he got her a piano that had previously belonged to a relocating neighbors.

Since his parents couldn't pay piano lessons, Robinson initially taught himself to play the piano . After taking his first job, he was finally able to afford some piano lessons at the Chicago Conservatory of Music . In 1992 he was introduced to the pianist Jon Weber, who recorded a demo with Robinson and passed it on to the head of the jazz label Delmark Records , Robert G. Koester, who then signed Robinson.

On his first two albums The Strongman (1993) and Sounds in Silhouette (1994) Robinson played mostly his own compositions with a few sprinkles of ragtime classics such as Scott Joplin's " Maple Leaf Rag ". On the album Euphonic Sounds (1998), which was released after a long break, a piece with vocals (interpreted by Sondra Davis) can be heard for the first time. The album also contains a fragment of a composition by Joplin as an intro, which was reconstructed from a photo using a magnifying glass. Another difference to the two predecessors is the higher proportion of foreign compositions. Robinson now financed his living, among other things, as a jazz pianist in a bar, played at ragtime festivals and traveled through the USA on a government educational mission.

Despite some attention from musicians and critics, the albums released by Delmark were not top sellers. Robinson initially disappeared from the scene, at least as far as publications were concerned. When he was doing so financially that he couldn't even pay for the heating in his apartment and had given up practicing and composing, he was surprisingly awarded the $ 500,000 ($ 100,000 annually over five years) MacArthur Fellowship in September 2004 . In 2006 he was able to release another album called Man Out of Time ( Robinson literally felt the amount offered by Delmark for the album two years earlier as a starvation wage), on which he played exclusively his own compositions for the first time.

With his many years of specialization in ragtime, Robinson is unique in the music scene. Other pianists such as Morten Gunnar Larsen have also dealt with ragtime, but some of his albums also contain tracks from the early days of jazz by Jelly Roll Morton , while Robinson has consistently devoted himself to ragtime on all of his albums.

Discography

title	year	Label
The strongman	1993	Delmark
Sounds in silhouette	1994	Delmark
Euphonic sounds	1998	Delmark
Man out of time	2006	Playa Music

swell

• Howard Reich's article "Ragtime Blues" in the May 1, 2005 issue of the Chicago Tribune , p. 12.
• Liner notes for the respective albums

Web links

• Official website (English)
• Reginald R. Robinson at Allmusic (English)
• Reginald R. Robinson at Discogs (English)