Original image by There Stands the Glass.
Millions of people heard Scott Joplin’s 1902 composition “The Entertainer” for the first time in 1973. Recorded for the soundtrack of “The Sting,” Marvin Hamlisch’s rendition was a fluke hit. I was among the dumbstruck listeners who asked “what is this amazing music, and why haven’t I heard anything like it before?”
I had a similar experience at the Folly Theater on Sunday, May 15. Samantha Ege didn’t play ragtime at her free piano recital for an audience of about 200. Instead, the British musicologist revived the neglected compositions of African American women. Selections by the likes of Florence Price sounded as if Claude Debussy had moved to Chicago to become the music director of an African Methodist Episcopal congregation.
The obscurity of the seamless melding of European classical music with American blues and gospel is a cultural crime. In the remarkably sensitive hands of Ege, the works of Price, Margaret Bonds, Zenobia Powell Perry, Betty Jackson King and Nora Holt seem no less delightful or significant than the output of George Gershwin and Aaron Copland.