Black Manhattan Vol 2 – Paragon Ragtime Orchestra/

Somewhere in a Manhattan rehearsal loft around 1913, a pit pianist was banging out a tango-intermezzo while a chorus girl checked her seams in a cracked mirror, and nobody in the room imagined anyone would care a century later. Rick Benjamin cares. This second volume of his ongoing excavation of Black theatrical composers in old New York makes the case, again, that the history of American music was written largely by people whose names got swept off the marquee.

The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra plays like a pit band because it more or less is one: ten or eleven players, strings thin enough to hear the individual bow strokes, cornets that snap rather than blare, a piano that works as connective tissue rather than as soloist showing off. This isn’t anachronism dressed up as authenticity. Benjamin has gone back to original parts, often literally rescued from oblivion, and the results have a lean, unglamorous vitality no modern studio-orchestra arrangement could fake.

Eubie Blake’s overture to Shuffle Along opens the disc with the kind of controlled combustion that made the 1921 show a sensation on Broadway — the first book musical by Black writers to break through to a white uptown audience. You can hear why in six minutes flat. Will Vodery’s orchestration crackles. The trombone “hokum,” a vaudeville trick of smears and whinnies, is deployed here with real wit rather than cheap mugging.

Bert Williams’s “Nobody” arrives inevitably, and rightly so. This was the song that defined a career and, in some ways, imprisoned it. Williams sang it in blackface his whole life, a Black man performing minstrelsy’s grotesque mask to white audiences who never saw past it, and the melancholy comedy of the tune still stings faintly under Edward Pleasant’s baritone, even divorced from Williams’s own weary deadpan delivery.

Elsewhere the revelations come from names history simply misplaced. Will H. Dixon’s “Brazilian Dreams,” a tango-intermezzo from 1914, is genuinely lovely — no wonder Victor and Edison both rushed to record it, no wonder Vernon and Irene Castle danced to it in their heyday. Dixon’s other contribution, the “Breath of Autumn” concert waltz, has a wistful chromatic slide in its inner voices that Brahms would not have been ashamed of. Nobody is claiming Dixon as an unsung Brahms. Just a craftsman who knew how to turn a phrase.

Will Marion Cook’s “Returned: A Negro Ballad,” to a Paul Laurence Dunbar text, is the disc’s most ambitious and most vulnerable inclusion. Cook studied with Dvořák briefly and with Joachim in Berlin, trained as a concert violinist before Jim Crow America decided that wasn’t a career available to him, and there is real harmonic sophistication in this ballad’s part-writing. But at over six minutes it sags. Anita Johnson sings it with sincerity and clean tone, though I found myself wishing for a soprano willing to underplay the drama rather than lean into it — the piece needs restraint it doesn’t get.

That’s a small complaint that recurs. Johnson’s voice, trained and forward-placed, brings an operatic sheen to “Honey Lamb” that the ballad’s modest ambitions don’t really call for. You want a little more parlor, a little less recital hall. Robert Mack fares better in lighter material, and Linda Thompson Williams, brought in specifically for the blues numbers, understands that W. C. Handy’s “Aunt Hagar’s Children Blues” wants dirt under its fingernails, not polish.

Scott Joplin’s “Pine Apple Rag Song” is a lesser Joplin, frankly — the rag reworked with lyrics tacked on, popular in its day but thin next to “Maple Leaf” or “Solace.” Still, it’s good to hear it played rather than merely mentioned in the Joplin literature. Wilbur Sweatman’s “That’s Got ‘Em” Rag, by contrast, justifies its own existence completely: two and a half minutes of peppery syncopation from a clarinetist-bandleader who later gave a very young Duke Ellington some of his first professional work.

James Reese Europe gets two entries, “Goodnight Angeline” and “The Castle Walk,” and both remind you what was lost when Europe was murdered by one of his own drummers in 1919, at the peak of his fame, having led a Black regimental band through the trenches of France and back to a hero’s welcome. He was arguably doing more than anyone to bring syncopated dance music into the American mainstream. “The Castle Walk” especially, tight and propulsive, shows why Vernon and Irene Castle needed him.

Will Accooe’s Black Patti Waltzes, honoring soprano Sissieretta Jones — denied the operatic career her voice reportedly deserved, consigned instead to vaudeville circuits under a nickname invoking Adelina Patti — has outlived its composer’s memory entirely. Accooe died at thirty. This rescue restores at least a fragment of him to the record.

Sound engineering is warm, close without being airless. The disc as artifact, with extensive booklet notes and biographical sketches of composers nobody else bothers to research, reflects Benjamin’s evident scholarly devotion. Not everything here is a master