MORATH

Max Morath, American ragtime pianist, composer, actor, radio and television personality and author, occupies a unique space as a spokesman for American music and popular culture. He worked his way through Colorado College as a radio announcer, graduating in 1948 with a degree in English. Summer jobs as a pianist with melodrama companies in Colorado and Arizona led to a growing fascination with ragtime and American popular music. Graduate studies at the Stanford-NBC Radio and Television Institute sharpened his media skills.

In the early 1960s he wrote and performed two nationally distributed Public Television series: The Ragtime Era and Turn of the Century – half-hour shows which explored vintage American popular culture through our music and theatre. He played a key role in the revival of ragtime in the 1970s with his Off-Broadway show Turn of the Century (1969). Other productions followed and by the time he retired from performing in 2007, he had logged over 5000 engagements in the USA and Canada.

Max’s thesis for a Master’s Degree in American Studies from Columbia University (1996) devoted to the life and work of American songwriter Carrie Jacobs-Bond inspired his biographical novel I Love You Truly (iUniverse, 2008). National Public Radio commissioned him to research and write their Curious Listener’s Guide to Popular Standards (Putnam/Perigee, 2002) and he is represented in The Oxford Companion to Jazz (Oxford, 2000) with the essay “Ragtime Then and Now.” His current projects include consultation on a film documentary based on the life of James Reese Europe and co-authorship of a screenplay devoted to the life of John William “Blind” Boone.

Many of his piano/vocal recordings on the Vanguard label remain available on CDs and a collection of his original rags for piano is available from Hal Leonard including “Echoes of the Rosebud”, “Gold Bar Rag”, “Golden Hours”, “One for Amelia”, “Polyragmic”. Max Morath remains active today as a writer, composer and consultant.