ragtime

Joplin is the most famous of the ragtime composers.

I can't fault his analysis of ragtime music, but he needn't paint me as an enemy.

Reminds me of an aside in Accelerando:> His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime.

But yes I understand your impulse to deduce a programmer's error to a room full of bad guys or "dicks".Your whole blog is ragtime man and HN isn't the place for it.

In jazz you might vary it up some more, mixed in with some voice leading in the comping and some walking bass lines, but anyways, while ragtime might not be jazz, they do have some common language.

So there is a lot of influence from that area, but I love the sounds I find in different types of music, from ragtime to swing to blues, classic rock, indie, cabaret, folk, Celtic, and so on.

He is obviously a very skilled musician and can play ragtime like Scott Joplin but picking up a new piece and playing it by sight without any mistakes that I could see or hear, is amazing.

The ConstitutionA noble piece of paperWith free societyStruggled but it died in vainAnd now Democracy is ragtime on the cornerHoping for some rainLooks like it's hopingHoping for some rain

It sounds like you might be more of a "thinker" than a "feeler".If you're more of a "thinker", start at the beginning, learning about the roots of blues and ragtime, what life was like in New Orleans in 1900.. Then work your way forward, learning about how jazz evolved into more modern forms.

The author derides the ahistorical, overly-respectful approach of people who treat ragtime like pre-20th-century classical music - but fails to acknowledge that this approach is just as ahistorical and overly-respectful when applied to pre-20th-century classical.

For the earliest entries consider hunting down the major influences on their genre or a couple major popular acts from the preceding 10-20 years before them to get a sense of where they came from—maybe a few tracks of ragtime, a crooner or two, a couple big-band acts, some early and mid-period jazz, maybe an album of "standards" or something, a small selection of early rock.