THEY HAD RHYTHM TOO

By Michael Walsh

GEORGE GERSHWIN--EVERYONE remembers him. But Edward Elzear ("Zez") Confrey? Pauline Alpert? John Green? Dana Suesse? Today no one can even pronounce some of these names, yet once upon a time--back in the 1920s and '30s--all four of these pianist-composers thrilled large audiences with a scintillating mix of ragtime, jazz and classical sounds that became known as novelty piano. Lost in the shadows cast by Gershwin's brilliance, they have been forgotten, and undeservedly so.

A new eight-CD project on the Pearl label called Keyboard Wizards of the Gershwin Era aims to change that. So too does a contemporary pianist named Peter Mintun, who is working to restore novelty piano to its rightful place in the history of our popular culture. He recently opened a four-month engagement playing novelty compositions and pop classics at the posh Carlyle Hotel in New York City.

Novelty can be thought of as a kind of long-haired half sibling to ragtime. Tony Caramia, associate professor of piano at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and one of the country's leading experts in ragtime and novelty piano, explains that "unlike the ragtime musicians, who were young, itinerant blacks, the novelty folks were primarily classically trained. These influences showed up in the more advanced harmonies in their music. It still sounds like ragtime, and the left hand is boom, chunk, boom, chunk, but they leave no syncopated stone unturned."

Examples abound in the Pearl series. The easy virtuosity of Pauline Alpert's Rain on the Roof, with its cascading arpeggios and delicate filigree work, matches the best that classical contemporaries like Josef Hofmann or Josef Lhevinne had to offer. Her performance of Gershwin's Fascinatin' Rhythm out-Gershwins the great man himself. Confrey's rhythmically tricky 1921 showpiece, Kitten on the Keys, is novelty's signature tune, but his Humorestless, a clever musical pun on both Dvorak's Humoresque and Stephen Foster's Old Folks at Home, is equally typical of his exuberant style. Most ambitious of all was the "Girl Gershwin," Dana Suesse (pronounced Sweese), born in Kansas City, Missouri. Her complex compositions such as Afternoon of a Black Faun and Jazz Concerto in D Major for Combo and Orchestra--she certainly wore her influences on her record sleeve--deserve a place in musical history alongside such crossover classics as Gershwin's Concerto in F, Igor Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto and Aaron Copland's clarinet concerto. "Dana Suesse was a marvelous pianist," says Mintun, who wrote the liner notes for Pearl's Suesse album. "Her piano solos painted vivid tonal pictures of exciting urban life. You hear little hints of Debussy or Ravel in her work, yet you also hear the elements of something new in that period that they called jazz."

The San Francisco-based Minton, 45, has devoted his career to the music of the '20s and '30s. With his dapper dress and trim moustache, the pianist even looks as if he could have stepped out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Suesse is his special passion. At 20 he wrote a fan letter to the aging pianist, then living in Connecticut. Their correspondence blossomed into a friendship, and after hearing a tape of his playing, Suesse invited Mintun to visit her. When she moved to the Virgin Islands in 1975, she gave her protege her scrapbooks, recordings and, at a fraction of its true worth, her Steinway.

Overseeing the Pearl series is music historian Artis Wodehouse, whose Gershwin Plays Gershwin album won raves when it came out in 1994. For that CD, Wodehouse rerecorded Gershwin's piano-roll performances by playing them on a Yamaha Disklavier, a kind of computer-driven player piano. The Pearl set is based on actual historic recordings--78s, Edison 80s, radio-broadcast acetates. Wodehouse painstakingly tracked them down around the country and cleaned them up for modern ears. "It's a shame that they got lost in the shuffle," says Wodehouse. "But great pop music comes back, and that is what is going to happen here."

For Suesse and the other novelty pianists, recognition arrives too late for them to enjoy. Pauline Alpert, who lived out her final days afraid to leave her home on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, died in 1988, Suesse the year before. Still, their brash, high-stepping music lives on, as key a piece of Americana as flappers, bathtub gin and Calvin Coolidge's Indian headdress--and twice as much fun.

--Reported by Daniel S. Levy/New York

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York