The sound of a big band orchestra playing ragtime music in a cemetery would seem odd to most people.
But not to those gathered at St. Michael’s cemetery, where legendary African-American composer and pianist Scott Joplin is interred. Last weekend marked the fifth consecutive year that aficionados came together to celebrate and honor the man responsible for hits like the “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer.”
“It has become a tradition now for people to come out every year,” said Edward Horn, director of community affairs at St. Michael’s, who added that in some cultures it’s customary to celebrate and dance at funerals and in cemeteries. “We are not a warehouse for the past. We are here to bring music and celebration too.”
While people stood on line for hamburgers and beer from the Harlem Brewery Co. – brewed by the great-granddaughter of a man that once performed with Joplin – the 1920s and ‘30s style music of Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks Orchestra blew in the wind. Also, Joplin biographer Dr. Edward Berlin presented a pre-concert discussion and slideshow about Joplin.
“Scott Joplin popularized ragtime, which certainly proceeded what we are hearing now,” said Berlin, whose book King of Ragtime grew out of another book project on the early American jazz. “He prepared the country for what came later.”
With saxophone and trumpet sounds floating over and across tombstones, Maureen Santora felt the Scott Joplin celebration made the atmosphere at the cemetery different.
“We like to support Ed [Horn]. He sees the cemetery as something alive,” said Santora, who has most of her family buried at St. Michael’s, including her firefighter son Christopher, who died on September 11, 2001. “I like to celebrate their life. A cemetery is usually a sad place but when you come to this place you are reminded of them when they were alive.”
As the band wound down, a few revelers walked over to Joplin’s gravesite. They exchanged factoids about Joplin, who was born in Texarkana, Texas, and travelled north playing along Mississippi River communities before arriving in Chicago where he started a band; eventually Joplin settled and died in New York.
An old Irish widow called Joplin one of the masters of syncopation and thanked him for “what he’d given us.”
“The only thing is that there should be more African-American people here,” said Mary Doran of Astoria. “Especially the young people because this is your music. You gave us this.”
