Bruce Vermazen

Bruce Vermazen is the author of That Moaning Saxophone: The Six Brown Brothers and the Dawning of a Musical Craze (Oxford University Press, 2004) and until 2000 was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He became interested in ragtime when he joined the Chrysanthemum Ragtime Band in 1978. As cornetist, announcer, and finally musical director of the Chrysanthemums, he pursued ragtime research as a sideline and ultimately published articles on San Francisco musicians Jay Roberts and Art Hickman as well as the Brown Brothers. For a decade, he played cornet with the San Francisco Starlight Orchestra.