Royce Martin Charts a New Path for Ragtime

Fifty years after The Sting, it takes a special kind of musician to breathe new life into “The Entertainer” or “Solace”—those Scott Joplin masterpieces that briefly captivated the world before their ubiquity and kitschy associations with ice cream trucks and pizza parlors led some in the ragtime community to quip “Oh Sting! Where is thy death?” At ragtime and jazz festivals, pianists often shy away from these warhorses; everyone in the audience already knows them note-for-note, and with so many superb performances and recordings through the years, playing them yet again often seems unnecessary. But at the 2023 Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival, a young performer making his festival debut unassumingly took the stage under the main tent and held the audience spellbound as he played these and other Joplin standards in startling, fresh arrangements brimming with creativity, virtuosity, and plenty of surprises. The assembled Joplin die-hards had never heard anything quite like it, and by the end of the week, 23-year-old Royce Martin was the talk of the town. Of course, Royce didn’t spring up ex nihilo. For the past few years, he has been making musical waves—and friends—in his native St. Louis. From humble beginnings as a self-taught musician to docent at the Scott Joplin House State Historic Site to studies at the famed Berklee College of Music and now a bu