Hank Jones Swings the Ragtime Standard
Jones treats ragtime not as museum music but as living material for improvisation and reinterpretation.
This Is Ragtime Now! arrived in 1964 as an unusual project for a pianist at Jones's level — a straightforward jazz reading of early American ragtime compositions, recorded for ABC-Paramount. It was neither a critical sensation nor a commercial breakout, the kind of mid-catalog release that most listeners overlooked in favor of Jones's more celebrated work. But the album has aged better than its initial reception suggested, partly because Jones refuses to treat ragtime as a relic. He doesn't sentimentalize it or dress it up in false reverence. Instead, he dismantles and rebuilds these tunes as vehicles for his own melodic intelligence and harmonic clarity.
The real value here is hearing a pianist of Jones's caliber prove that ragtime structures can support genuine improvisation. These aren't arrangements — they're conversations. Jones phrases over Scott Joplin's blueprints the way he might over a standard, finding new angles in melodies that had calcified into nostalgia. His touch is unhurried, almost conversational, which works perfectly for material that could easily tip into novelty or parody in less thoughtful hands. The rhythmic precision is exact without ever sounding stiff.
This record sits apart from Jones's peak Blue Note sessions and his later work as an accompanist. It's not essential to understanding his career, but it reveals something worth knowing: that he had genuine curiosity about American musical history, and the technical means to explore it without condescension. The album deserves attention from listeners interested in how jazz musicians have engaged with earlier traditions, and from anyone who simply enjoys hearing piano played with intelligence and restraint.
