Album Notes

Composer/pianist David Thomas Roberts offers 15 of his own works and one by John Hancock which draw inspiration from the land's "visionary potential". Though the material here is mostly New Ragtime, the influences comprising Roberts' unique sound range from Folk Ragtime, bluegrass, early jazz, late romanticism, Latin Music, country music, to early rock and roll.

"This is a great album. David Thomas Roberts' playing gets deeper, more profound and more sentimental as time progresses."
-- George Winston.

About The Company:

The recordings of Viridiana Productions, L.L.C. represent a grass roots movement designed to promote the new music Terra Verde, as well as various traditions from which it draws. Terra Verde, a contemporary and distinctly American musical art form, fuses elements of European romanticism with New World ethnic styles, such as ragtime, jazz, Latin-American and country.The result is a rich and vital language for our time, and a new stage in the evolution of piano-based composition. Viridiana exists to champion the composers and performers of Terra Verde, and to pay tribute to the innovative and sometimes unheralded forerunners to this exciting new realm of American music.

About The Artist:

Composer-pianist, writer and visual artist, David Thomas Roberts has been hailed by many as New Ragtime's leading figure. Born in Moss Point, Mississippi in 1955, he was composing, painting and writing stories by age eight. He wrote his first rag in 1971, at which time he was especially interested in the music of Erik Satie, Scott Joplin, Charles Ives and Alexander Scriabin, whose work he encountered and studied independently of any teacher. Since then he has composed over eighty-five ragtime related piano pieces while continuing to work in a variety of other musical languages.

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".

David Thomas Roberts is the author of entries in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music and is listed in The International Who's Who in Music. He founded and edited The Streetfighting Aesthete, a journal of Surrealist expression and experimental writing. His poetry appears in many U.S. small press periodicals, and his paintings were recently featured in the British magazine of Visionary Art, Raw Vision. He lives in south Mississippi and southern Missouri.