Spinach Rag - Nobuo Uematsu - 植松伸夫 - sight-read by Tom Brier

By popular demand, here's Tom Brier sight-reading Spinach Rag. He has read through this once before, about six years ago, so technically this is his second and third time playing it.

Some fun ensues as a customer at the Sutter Creek Ice Cream Emporium, where this was recorded, talks to Tom in awe of how he can do the long left-hand jumps without looking at his hands.

That this tune is in sharps instead of flats makes it a bit more difficult to read, since very few rags are in sharp keys. I've been meaning to make a new score of this but have not gotten around to it, so what Tom is reading is this more primitive score that I made in Encore about 10 years ago after receiving an email with MIDI file attached from someone in Japan saying, "My friend makes music for video games. He wrote this rag."

That original, primitive score I made, which Tom is reading, is here:
http://www.keeper1st.com/spinach.pdf or on my page http://www.keeper1st.com/music/vgm.html

It wasn't until recently that I learned what game this was from (Final Fantasy VI). This was the first piece of ragtime from a video game that I had ever come across.

After this recording, Tom said that he had forgotten what a good rag it was, and that he should dig out the copy I gave him so many years ago and really learn to play it. So maybe there's an actual performance of this to come in the future...

This was recorded at the July meeting of the Mother Lode Ragtime Society, which meets in every odd-numbered month (except November) on the evening of the second Saturday at the Sutter Creek Ice Cream Emporium, 51 Main Street (old Highway 49), Sutter Creek, California.

The town of Sutter Creek also hosts an annual ragtime festival every August with dozens of musicians (yes, including Tom). See http://www.suttercreekragtime.com for details.