BEST MOMENTS AND ARRANGEMENTS OF ADAM SWANSON

Описание: Best moments and arrangements of Adam Swanson!

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Who is Adam Swanson?:
Adam Swanson is a world-renowned pianist of vintage American popular music, specializing in ragtime, early jazz, and the Great American Songbook. He is the only four-time winner of the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and has been a featured performer and lecturer at ragtime and jazz festivals across the United States and internationally.

When he was ten years old, Swanson first heard the “Maple Leaf Rag” and asked his mother, a casual pianist, to teach it to him. After playing along with her for two months, Swanson had already surpassed his mother's abilities and sought out professional teachers, the first of whom reportedly “struggled with what to do with a kid who couldn’t read a note, but could already play ragtime!" In fact, after learning to read musical notation, Swanson quickly progressed through a succession of "eight or nine" piano teachers before finding Waleed Howrani, the well-known composer-pianist who is both a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory and a student of Emil Gilels.

Though he had started playing only in 2002, Swanson's extraordinary progress enabled him to win the junior division of the 2003 World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest, becoming its youngest champion ever. He went on to win the junior division two more times, and in 2008, at the age of sixteen, became the youngest ever to win the adult World Championship. After subsequent victories in the 2009 and 2010 contests Swanson retired from the competition, only to return in 2015 and become the only four-time adult world champion in the competition's forty-six-year history.

Adam's performances have been viewed millions of times on YouTube, where some of his presentations on the history of ragtime and American popular music are also available. The latter include seminars on the life and music of his mentor Johnny Maddox and on other ragtime artists and composers, one of whom is the former British rock star and ragtime composer Ian Whitcomb. Swanson helped Whitcomb produce and present "My Life in Ragtime," a retrospective of Whitcomb's career which the two artists presented at the 2017 West Coast Ragtime Festival. In the YouTube video of the event, Swanson performs several original Whitcomb rags in a style the veteran composer describes as "impeccable."
Swanson has performed regularly for many years at the classic Diamond Belle Saloon in Durango, Colorado, where he first met Johnny Maddox in 2004.

Though Swanson excels at several genres of popular American music, he remains best known as one of America's leading performers of ragtime. Accordingly, numerous noted American pianists and composers have spoken highly of his work, especially ragtime scholars and artists who are grateful the young musician is preserving the time-honored musical tradition from which many other American musical styles evolved.

Two mementos in particular from Swanson's large collection of memorabilia include such accolades: an autographed picture from 1940s piano child prodigy Frank "Sugar Chile" Robinson and an autographed copy of sheet music from million-selling composer and pianist Irving Fields. Robinson, who Swanson believes may be the sole popular boogie-woogie and jazz pianist from the 1940s still living, inscribed his picture "To Adam Swanson, another musical genius and also one of my fans" and in 2014, the then ninety-eight-year-old Fields autographed his arrangement of Stardust for the artist writing, "To Adam Swanson, A wonderful Pianist! A wonderful personality! I predict a great success in your future."

In 2009, Larry Karp in "The Ragtime Fool" described Swanson as "at age 17, already a first-line ragtime performer and historian," and more recently, 'Perfessor' Bill Edwards on RagPiano.com said Adam "has been and continues to be the future of ragtime." Similarly, in 2015, Johnny Maddox told his Gallatin, TN hometown paper that Swanson was “helping to keep ragtime alive” and “carrying on where I left off.” When Maddox retired in 2012, his comments to the Durango Herald about Swanson made it clear he believed Adam was definitely up to “carrying on” for him. In that parting interview, his famous mentor gave a compliment the young pianist will probably always prize, telling the newspaper that Adam Swanson "can make a piano knit a pair of socks!"