The fact of the matter is that no one really knows the story of ragtime, Been a lot of learned papers and articles written about it, and most of them are wrong because they oversimplify.

Houseman was a don at Cambridge University for some years, and he was a scholar in classical Greek and Latin literature.

Set in and around the ruin city of Phoenix, somewhere about the year 2000.

Good news recounts the efforts of a sagebrush furor to reunite an America shattered by economic collapse and civil war through the use of military force.

And it pushes off the floor.

Coming up, third time is the biggest and a down and coming back up and spine pulls off up out of the floor and comes down to rest.

We're going to do that three times.

Good evening I'm Blair Chotzinoff for season tick Tastes and music seem to change as often as radio announcers.

While growing up, I pass through a plethora of musical fashion, starting with jazz and going through boogie, swing, cool bebop and all the on and off flavors of rock and disco until The Sting brought the lilting syncopations of Scott Joplin to millions of film audiences.

Most of them, myself included, knew little, if anything, about ragtime.

Of course, we're all experts now, and as such, dote on the talents of Max Morath, a local boy who made very, very good.

A while back, we caught him at the Arvada Center.

My mother played good, strong ragtime.

She was a pianist, and I guess I started playing just enough of it as a kid that I got it down on my subconscious.

I started performing ragtime in the mountains in Colorado, in Cripple Creek in about 1950.

I had been playing piano and playing jazz, and I was working in the broadcasting business and doing some theater and nightclub work.

But in working the melodramas in the mountains, not only in Cripple Creek but some of the other mountain towns, I perforce was obliged to develop the repertory of the period, part of which was ragtime and part of which was theatrical music and songs and so forth.

So I began to do it for a living when I was in my early 20s.

You can't put things in neat pigeonholes.

It doesn't work out that way.

At least in America, we are chaos.

And the the fact of the matter is that no one really knows the story of ragtime.

Been a lot of learned papers and articles written about it, and most of them are wrong because they oversimplify.

What we had here was a lot of extremely talented, itinerant young black men working out of a culture that was essentially Protestant and white and in some ways restrictive, then spiced by the French and the Spanish influences and the the German music teachers and everything happening in a frontier where, you know, all rules were off and we got a thing which we now call by this silly name ragtime.

What does that mean?

No one knows.

I don't believe in those terms ragtime, jazz, folk, swing, rock, soul as having any musical meaning.

And I think if you talk to most musicians, they don't use those words.

They're meaningless.

They're professional terms that people that right house organs use.

These are ragtime pianos.

These are these a rock n roll drummer?

Back to the definition of ragtime, which we dealt with.

To take it simply.

Now, as a musical definition, they're developed at the turn of the century from people like Scott Joplin and other players, what we now call the classic ragtime style, which was a very precise, notated form of piano music that was highly syncopated and also rather lyrical in some cases, particularly Joplin's.

Now, if that's ragtime and it is, then so is this.

The evening everything was still open?

The moon was down behind the hill.

Oh, baby.

I thought everybody was fast asleep, but oh man, Johnson was on his beat.

Oh, baby.

I went down into a floating crap game where the boys was gambling with my damn maid.

I thought I'd be a sport and be dead game.

And I on the money.

But I wasn't to blame.

One Fells Point was Little Joe.

That six bits a quarter that he make the four.

He made that point, but he made no more.

Just then Johnson came through the door.

Oh, Mr.

Johnson, turn me loose.

I got no money but a good excuse.

Oh, Mr.

Johnson, I'll be good.

Oh, Mr.

Johnson, turn me loose.

Don't you take me to the calaboose b, old Mr.

Johnson.

I'll be good.

You know, the way I look at it.

What happened at the turn of the century?

Which is why I'm so fascinated by it.

Is that music?

And to a great extent, all of the arts became the property of the people with a capital P. That's what happened.

Music and theater.

Up until that time, really all over the world and in Western society especially, had been the had been the property of the elite.

And ragtime was the musical force in America that spread that out and made it belonged to all of us.

But if you take some of the old rags, such as the essential Scott Joplin rags, the Maple Leaf Rag, which was the biggest ragtime hit of all, and take the syncopation out, if that's possible, you get an idea of what ragtime did for music at the turn of the century.

It brought a vitality to music.

Music in those days was.

Well, I believe I'm right in saying the term square originated then when everything was played on the beat.

A singer in those days couldn't possibly approach that in any way.

But this East side, West side, all around the town, a ragtime singer and any singer today, because this has become part of our subconscious, would approach it.

East side, West side, all around the town.

Singing around the beat.

Playing around the beat.

Taking a simple little tune like East Side, West Side, which was a great hit and a waltz and ragtime superseded all that.

I don't think my audiences are people who are especially interested in or already predisposed toward ragtime and early theatrical American music.

I think if if that were the case, I'd be out of the business.

I don't think that there are that many specialists.

So what I've always tried to do in the various versions of the shows that I do, is present an entertainment that has some touch points that anyone who is interested in these things.

After all, you're not going to go out and bring them in off the streets.

But people who go to the theater who are interested in Americana, who are interested in music, will have someplace they can glue on to me.

And my success or failure then rests on the fact that they're out there in that seat saying, okay, you know, what do you do?

It doesn't take long to realize that Max's words are as eloquent as his fingers in season tickets.

Peripatetic pursuit of the cultural goodies available in Colorado.

We've brought you a menu of exotic dishes.

Profound, absurd, beautiful, pretentious.

Inspiring.

And let's sit this one out.

And now, for all you hardcore poetry addicts, we expand our coverage to sample a thus far missing muse.

Meet Shirley Grubb, a poetess or poet person will read from the works of two classic poets.

My first poem is a sonnet by John Keats.

He and a friend of his, Leigh Hunt, got together one evening and decided to have a competition to see who could write the better sonnet on The Grasshopper and the Cricket.

And this is Keats sonnet.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun.

And hide in cooling trees.

A voice will run from hedge to hedge about the Newman mead that is the grasshoppers.

He takes the lead in summer luxury.

He has never done with his delights.

For when tired out with fun, he rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing.

Never on a lone winter's evening.

When the frost has wrought.

A silence from the stove.

There shrivels the crickets song in warmth increasing ever.

And seems to one in drowsiness half lost.

The grasshoppers among some grassy hills.

The second poem is by A.E.

Housman.

It's a poem called The Merry Guide.

Housman was a don at Cambridge University for some years, and he was a scholar in classical Greek and Latin literature.

Once in the wind of morning, I arranged the tiny world.

The world wide air was azure, and all the brooks ran gold.

There in the dews beside me.

Behold a youth that trod with feathered cap on forehead and poised a golden rod with mean to match the morning.

And gay, delightful gaze and friendly brows and laughter.

He looked me in the eyes.

Oh, whence I asked.

And whither he smiled and would not say.

And looked at me, and beckoned, and laughed and led the way.

And with kind looks and laughter, and naught to say.

Besides, we too went on together.

I and my happy guide.

Across the glittering pastures and empty uplands.

Still and solitude of shepherds high in the folded hill.

By hanging woods and hamlets that gazed through orchards.

Down on many a windmill turning and far discovered town.

With gay regards of promise.

And sure un slackened stride and smiles and nothing spoken.

LED on my merry guide.

By blowing realms of woodland and sun struck veins of field and cloud led shadows.

Sailing about the windy Weald by valley guarded granges and silver waters wide content at heart, I followed with my delightful guide.

And like the cloudy shadows across the country, blown we to fair on forever.

But not we too alone with the great gale.

We journey that breathes from gardens thinned.

Born in the drift of blossoms.

Whose petals throng.

The wind buoyed on the heaven.

Heard whisper of dancing leaflets.

World from all the woods that autumn.

Bereaved in all the world.

Amidst the fluttering legion of all that ever died I follow.

And before us goes the delightful guide.

With lips that brim with laughter.

And never once respond.

And feet that fly on feathers and serpent circled wand.

Take heed, O gentle viewer, lest thou be troubled.

That this was a one shot deal.

Next month we welcomed Chicano poet Abelardo Delgado and now back for another tilt with the bookmakers, our regional reviewer, Steve Levine.

Last time out he did a number on Aspen.

This time he has some well-chosen words about Phoenix.

This is Edward Abbey's new novel.

It's called Good News, though its subject matter is anything but cheerful.

Abbey, who lives in Arizona, has gained quite a following in this part of the country with his previous novels and essays about the modern southwest among the most militant of environmentalists, Abbey's work is frequently heavily laced with political commentary, and members of the cult who expect this of him won't be disappointed by good news, though they may, after they've read it, find themselves slightly baffled as to what was really said in such an impassioned tone.

Set in and around the ruined city of Phoenix somewhere about the year 2000, Good News recounts the efforts of a sagebrush furor to reunite an America shattered by economic collapse and civil war through the use of military force.

In Abbey's bleak future America, industry has ground to a halt.

For want of petroleum and other resources, the landscape is blighted by chemical poisons, the government has broken down and the cities have emptied out as their population has spread across the land in search of food.

In fact, so sparsely people, is the landscape of this book.

One wonders grimly, what became of 190 million folks, with all communication lost between the isolated groups of survivors, there is nothing to thwart the fascist designs of the chief and his expeditionary army, except the disconnected efforts of a ragtag band of misfits and malcontents lurking about in the shadow of the chief's headquarters, the last remaining skyscraper in Phoenix with electricity.

The dissidents, consisting of student anarchists, displaced cowboys, open hearted barmaids and Hopi shaman, are obviously meant to be the good guys and good news, and some of them come off rather well as characters, particularly Jack Burns, an ancient one eyed rancher, and Sam, the smooth talking medicine man.

At least.

Unlike Abbey's heavies, they occasionally engage in dialog.

The baddies like the Chief and Sergeant Brock, who heads his sadistic degenerate secret police force, are given to long winded rhetorical diatribes about the destiny of man.

When not otherwise occupied with hanging, their political opponents head down over mesquite fires for a dozen or so pages of the Destiny of man stuff.

The reader might be seriously tempted by the mesquite fire, the women characters being perhaps least suited to Abby's lean, muscular prose style suffer the worst.

There are only three of them, all described as handsome, and they too are used as ideological placeholders representing simple decency, youthful idealism and upper class decadence.

The plot with which good news is not overburdened is mostly comic book stuff.

The white hats spend most of their time trying to rescue one another from the Phoenix clutches of the chief and his minions, with the vague notion of somehow sabotaging the impending military takeover.

The adventure material is all properly hair raising and heroic, and to the extent that you can care what happens to a bunch of people who spend their off hours in win bag oratory.

Reasonably suspenseful, Abby's descriptive powers are indisputable when he writes of the desert in which he seems to know every rock and cactus personally, he goes directly from the pedantic to the lyric in a dizzying leap.

After much lovingly rendered bloodletting, the book fails to resolve its fundamental conflicts, seeming to suggest that the battle between mindless materialism and the pursuit of higher principles is bound to end inconclusively.

However, the real object of contention and good news is the author's sympathies.

Though the collapse of American society is presented to us as a great catastrophe, so withering as Abby's contempt for the soft, morally lax way of life, it allowed you get the feeling he doesn't miss it much so powerful as the writer's longing for the elemental challenges of a frontier culture, you wonder how high a price he would have his pay to regain won the desire for a clear stage upon which brave men can perform feats of derring do, of course, is precisely the sentiment that propels a lot of idiotic military adventures of the type Abby denounces, which may account for the sneaky undercurrent of sick glamor flowing through the author's depiction of the chief's jack booted legions.

Still, one thing good news does very effectively is mirror the confusion of the era, with the drills and drag lines poised over our region in preparation for a last, desperate attempt to preserve our wasteful and shortsighted habits.

We ought not dismiss too quickly the melancholy tidings at the core of this flawed but provocative book.

The views of Mr.

Levine do not necessarily reflect, etc., etc.

except for that business about Phoenix being emptied by the year 2000.

Now that could be a good thing in my world.

There aren't too many people who get up in the morning, get dressed in scratchy underwear, and torture their muscles in front of a huge mirror.

But when the Colorado contemporary dance brought in Jennifer Mueller in the works, a covey of area dancers showed up for a master class where they started by bending over and touching the floor.

Okay, what we're going to do is we're going to start in parallel position.

We're going to run through a tripartite class here, start in the center, go to the bar and then go across the floor and try to introduce to you a little bit of the way that we work, the process that I work in and of if it's really new to you, don't worry about it.

Just see if you can experience what is going on here.

What I want you to do is just stand with your feet.

Pretty much an inch, inch and a half inch and three quarters inch and a half apart.

Okay, close your eyes.

Let your arms hang down and just listen to me for a moment.

I think that a masterclass is such a brief period of time that basically all that I tried to bring is the sense of enjoying dancing, because dance is a very hard master, but it also is a very beautiful thing to spend your life doing.

And I think the communication of that is my foremost intention and desire.

Our approach is based, as I mentioned a little earlier, on body rhythm and on full and recovery and on breath rhythm.

And I think that the introduction of that for me, when I found it in my life when I was young, was such a great, freeing element because I could accept my body as a human body that had the blood flowing through it and the air circulating.

And I thought of it as what I call software, that it wasn't a hard positional, marionette ish kind of thing.

And so it's introducing some of those ideas, some of the risk of falling off balance and coming back onto balance down.

And it's very small.

Everything's very small coming up.

Energy through the middle drains down and it pushes off the floor.

Coming up.

Third time is the biggest and a down and coming back up and spine pulls off up out of the floor and comes down to rest.

We're going to do that three times that series.

And then we just snake down to the floor resting eight counts down and come back up just off of the hip joints.

Okay.

You're going to have to listen to me sing seven, two and three and 80.

We go, it's one down and two.

Here we go.

It's three.

And was a four at a better down breathing out.

Here we go.

If you go back in the basis of a principle, if you go back into polarity in life you come up with male female yin yang, up, down, in, out, expansive, contracting.

There's always a sense of polarity.

And this technique is based on that.

The breath going in, the breath going out, going down to the floor, coming up, away from the floor and how that influences the body.

When you're down, you're heavy.

When you're down, you're you're giving in your yielding.

You are receptive.

When you're coming up, you have a sense of bullets, of buoyancy, of, of, of stretching away from the floor, of lengthening the body and reaching with your head and reaching with the energy of your body up toward the ceiling.

And and then it becomes more complicated.

Right?

You're going down while you're reaching with your arms or you're going down.

You're going up as you're dropping.

So you add a complication to it.

But I think the basic source is the breath and the life force in the body.

And so I do a lot of work talking about lines of energy.

I do a lot of work talking about the energy coming out of the abdomen, coming out of lower back, extending into the parts of the body, and that the hands and the feet are connected into the universe, and the head is connected into the universe with lines of energy, just like Castaneda mentions in his talks with that one.

And it's very strange, because the more you get back into the teachings, when you finally get down to principles of life, all teachings are the same.

They all talk about the same things.

And I think this technique is one that is based on those principles.

Hey, hey, I'm way, I'm way, way for more counts.

We give in.

Just let it hang.

Give in.

Hey, I'm with way, I'm way, way.

Alrighty.

Okay.

Much better.

We're getting much closer to do.

You start to feel the difference on that 74 when I started the company, I was thinking, what am I going to call this, another dance?

It was one of our jokes was calling in just another dance company.

But I decided against that and I didn't want to call it Dance Theater Dance company.

I wanted to leave the name of the company open enough to include theater, to include voice, because we do do work with voice, and we do do work with dialog, and we do study acting and voice.

And I wanted to leave it open so that it was an ensemble group, the works.

And at the moment, because I'm the head of it, Jennifer Mueller in the works and the works for me is a very interesting name because it means the workings of a clock.

Or it could just be the pieces, the works themselves, or it could be when something works, it's going smoothly.

Or as in a hot dog, give me the works, you know, give me everything.

So that's really where the name came about reading and gather from the back and up, and it's on to the floor and straight down like we had in the beginning class.

And coming back up, we're going to start to the other side.

It's clear and breathe for three full.

Trampled it and breathing right to the fingertips.

And it's all down and breathe.

I think an eclectic background in dance is the most valuable to have.

I think I'm a great believer that one can study classical dance and contemporary styles, of which there are many, many, many contemporary styles and approaches.

And I think that when you're young, the more of those that you can study, the better off you are, because I think that the body has only so many parts, and that if you learn to channel your energy correctly through your body, you can do any number of techniques.

So I usually just recommend technique is for me a means of control your communication with your body.

It's a means of control.

It's.

And why limit yourself to having the letters 8 a.m.

when you're creating a paragraph.

When you're trying to write, why not take A to Z?

And then you'll find your own personal style within that, and you'll gravitat away.

Hey, yo, what about my way?

Hey, what they I. Okay.

That's class.

Thank you, thank you.

Thank you very much very much.

If that sort of energy turns you on, Colorado Contemporary Dance will be bringing Paul Taylor's nationally known dance company to town in February.

Next week, we'll check out junk artist Mario Rivoli, find out about the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities, and Shake and Quake with belly dancer Nyla.

See you then.