The Rose Leaf Ragtime Club has been on my mind for the past few weeks. Recently, I've taken over handling the e-mail database from Ron Ross, who has reliably performed these duties for decades. I'm doing what I can to make sure the club remains viable - with regular attendance from both piano players and audience members. Since the pandemic, this has been easier said than done. For those that don't know, our club meets monthly on the second Sunday of the month at the Barkley Restaurant and Bar in South Pasadena, California from 1:00 - 4:00 PM. If you're able to come - especially if you are a ragtime pianist - please consider dropping by at one of our meetings.
Last Sunday, our meeting coincided with Mother's Day - a perhaps detrimental coincidence - but our audience attendance was actually above average. However, due to Ron Ross feeling a bit under the weather and John Reed-Torres schedule as an MTA driver, I was left to fend for myself as the sole pianist for much of the afternoon. I'm grateful to have a place to play ragtime in public for an appreciative audience - no matter what size, but admittedly, this is a far cry from the club I was lucky enough to wander into as a kid one Sunday in August 2005.
The Rose Leaf Ragtime Club was founded in August 1995 by P.J. Schmidt - initially as an off-shoot of the Maple Leaf Club, but when the Maple Leaf Club closed shop in Southern California, the Rose Leaf and Orange County Ragtime Society became spiritual successors to the esteemed Maple Leaf Club, which was one of the largest and earliest ragtime revival societies in America. Over the years, many of the finest syncopated pianists anywhere have performed at the Rose Leaf, and I met many of them there for the first time. I was already attracted to ragtime piano music when I first attended - having been exposed to it at Clearman's North Woods Inn, Disneyland, and in various other places - but the Rose Leaf Ragtime Club is where I fell deeply in love with the music - and absorbed nearly everything I know about ragtime piano performance, composition, and history. Perhaps more than any other region in the country, there is a deep tradition of composer-pianists at the Rose Leaf Ragtime Club and Orange County Ragtime Society - Fred Hoeptner, Ron Ross, Andrew Barrett, the late Nan Bostick, John Reed-Torres, Ed Maraga, Paul Orsi, Eric Marchese, the late George McClellan, Patrick Gogerty, Brad Kay... the list goes on and even includes one of our youngest regular attendees, Max Libertor.
This tradition extends all the way back to our club's founder, P.J. Schmidt. PJ died tragically young in September of 1999, and so I never had the chance to meet him - what little I know about him I've gleaned from decades-old newsletters I inherited from the late Bill Mitchell. PJ would've been 80 years old this year, and I like to imagine that he'd be amazed that his club - which was only four years old at the time of his passing - is still meeting regularly twenty-five years later. Sadly, PJ only issued one commercial recording - a cassette, no less - and his compositions have not received much exposure, nor are they widely available. In 2014, the brilliant composer Reginald Robinson generously provided me scores to three of P.J.'s compositions. They are delicate, haunting, beautiful compositions in the classic ragtime tradition. Here's "French Vanilla" - which won an honorable mention in Sedalia, Missouri in 1997 - for PJ, the Rose Leaf Club, and for Ragtime!