Most reviews look at one particular release. This one doesn’t. Instead, I will compare two releases by the same pianist, with similar repertoire, but separated by six years.
Bryan Wright is well known in music circles primarily as owner and producer of Rivermont Records (which specializes in early dance band recordings and modern ragtime interpretation). However, he deserves to be better known as an outstanding pianist of syncopated piano styles.
Syncopated Musings would be an impressive debut album by anyone at any level of maturity, but I was stunned to see that Mr. Wright was only 22 years old at the time of the recording. I don’t think that I would have been able to produce something with this level of subtlety or maturity at that age.
Due to limits of space, I’m not going to examine every work recorded. Instead I will nominate a few that I think stand out. The first, May Aufderheide’s The Thriller! is played a little faster than Max Morath did, but it is cleanly articulated, with mostly punctuated and clearly separated notes in the bass, with the occasional little changes in the melodic lines, and dynamics (e.g. the second strain is played a little louder during the repeat). I’m not a big fan of repeating sections, but if you’re going to do it, there has to be some variation, and Mr. Wright does so while holding the listener’s attention.
Arthur Marshall is not w
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