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David Thomas Roberts
Bunker, Missouri Updated 8/29/04 |
This Mississippi native presents a diverse and interesting program of music with styles including Classic and New Ragtime, early jazz, Creole and New World music, and the newly emerging Terra Verde, of which he is a major progenitor. In his early twenties he wrote some of the piano pieces for which he
is best known. His poetry was first published at that time. His first recording,
Music For a Pretty Baby, appeared in 1978. By 1984, two albums devoted
entirely to his own compositions were internationally available. Pieces
such as The Early Life of Larry Hoffer, Roberto Clemente, Pinelands Memoir,
Through the Bottomlands, and the eclectic suite, New Orleans Streets led
many writers to hail Roberts as the leading contemporary ragtime-based
composer. The New Orleans historian Al Rose called him "the most important
composer of this half of the century in America".
He describes himself as follows: "I call myself a 'terrain wrangler,' a commandeer of the land's visionary potential, a topographical rowdy bent upon revelation-through-landscape. This trait is central to much of my writing and painting, as well as composition. Inevitably, travel has been a crucial feature of my life, and has yielded much of the fodder for my ragtime-based piano pieces." "Our foremost composer of contemporary ragtime--" |