Max Keenlyside plays the New Ragtime Music of Vincent Mathew Johnson

I have been curious about this album for nearly as long as I have been with this paper. We launched in 2016 with me as a loyal reader and very occasional book reviewer. I didn’t begin album reviews until 2018 and Scott Yanow reviewed Invincible Syncopations before I had a chance to hear it. As the webmaster, I link names that appear in our articles back to a review or article about that person. Whenever Max Keenlyside or Vincent Mathew Johnson has been mentioned in our paper in the last six years I have linked it to that review by Scott. The beautiful cover of this album has become more familiar to me than many on my shelf, but until recently I had no conception of its contents. Only the noble claim that a living ragtime composer was worthy of an album-length tribute from a living ragtime pianist. Think about that for a moment. Why don’t musicians play each other’s compositions anymore? When I listen to original swing music from Glenn Crytzer, Keenan McKenzie, Danny Jonokuchi, or many others, I frequently long for the days when it was normal for others to record your compositions, sometimes even before you did. I recently discovered that a favorite Dylan song I knew from my ’90s youth was only commercially released with him playing it in 1991, on the Bootleg Series, but had been covered by dozens in the intervening 30 years. Most jazz releases I hear from new bands include a