The multi-award-winning swing and jazz pianist Bernd Lhotzky looks back at the jazz of the early days: ragtime
"Rag Bag"
Bernd Lhotzky, piano
The album of the same name was awarded the German "Schallplatenkritik" prize in 2024.
Ragtime and on
Rag Bag is a work of scissors, a montage, unfinished, unquestioning and asymmetrical. Ragtime was Bernd Lhotzky's introduction to jazz. He is still fascinated by this music today because it is so warm, life-affirming and undisguised: "I love the jazz of the early days because it is bursting with vitality and honest joy. Neither a piano roll nor a note-for-note reproduction can reproduce this emotionality", and he continues about his program "... it is a patchwork of different motifs and styles, of associations and loose thoughts about ragtime, about the colors and scents of the late 19th century. Echoes of Scott Joplin form a recurring basic motif, whose pretty, well-ordered compositions seem to contain no reference to his tragic life."
Bernd Lhotzky
Based on a breathtaking, classically trained piano technique, Lhotzky has been regarded for three decades as the most important German ambassador of classical jazz piano and as a bridge builder between its past and present. With countless performances and recordings as a soloist and in duos, as a concert and festival organizer and as the impulse-setting pianist of the band "Echoes of Swing", he invited people to rediscover jazz from the twenties to the fifties. Although still deeply rooted in both early jazz history and classical music, Bernd Lhotzky has opened up more and more in the course of his musical development. His current projects could hardly be more different: Rag Bag is a modern collage around the theme of ragtime. The Shakespeare sonnets that Lhotzky has set to music for Birgit Minichmayr combine folk music, art song, pop music, jazz and chanson. In his acoustic illustration of Otfried Preußler's Krabat, the mill wheel is driven by several interwoven 12-tone rows.
Bernd Lhotzky has been awarded the German Record Critics' Prize several times. Most recently for his solo album "Rag Bag", which he is now presenting live at the Villa Papendorf.
