Todd Robbins learned the Maple Leaf Rag by slowing down a Scott Joplin piano roll and watching where the keys went. In Part 1 of a two-part conversation, the magician, sideshow artist, and ragtime pianist tells Jonesy how a string of happy accidents built a career that now runs six nights a week at Speakeasy Magick in New York, a show he says he put together on the fly, "just like a jazz solo."

They get into the magic shop old-timers who taught a twelve-year-old to hammer a nail into his nose, hanging out with the Turk Murphy band in San Francisco, and a brand-new grand piano that could not survive Pete Clute's attack. Plus Todd's first days in New York, and the night Dick Wellstood played the entire stride book for an audience of one. Part 2 next week!

Check out Todd's long-running show: Speakeasy Magick

Chapters:

This week Quentin Walston, pianist, author, and jazz educator, joins Jonesy for a conversation about a simple idea: people enjoy the music more when they understand what is going on inside it. He would know. He broke down Take Five into a short video and four and a half million people watched.

They trace Quentin's path from a bluegrass corner of Virginia to a self-taught start on ragtime and boogie woogie, the moment in high school when the sound he was chasing finally clicked as jazz, and the wineries and cigar shops where he built his solo chops. Along the way: his book Jazz Piano Like a Pro, his vinyl album Retro Future, the joy he hears in Errol Garner and Duke Ellington, and a new project bringing 1920s stride piano back without a trace of corniness.

Buy Quentin's books or check out more info at his website:

https://quentinwalston.com/store

This week Jonesy sits down with the great Skip Heller: composer, guitarist, bandleader, arranger, and one of the most restlessly curious musicians you will ever meet. Skip grew up in Philadelphia a few blocks from Dizzy Gillespie's old house, never took a real music lesson, and built a life in music that runs from bebop to rockabilly to exotica.

They get into his new Dizzy Gillespie project with his band Voodoo 5, why joy is the fuel in the music he loves, growing up on the Smothers Brothers and John Hartford, learning harmony from chord diagrams in a music store, the day Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" turned a Philadelphia block into a dance scene, and a wild year on the road with Yma Sumac that ended at the Montreal Jazz Festival with the copyists still passing music up to the bandstand.

Skip on the heart of it all: "Art doesn't have to be serious and heavy. Art can have a joyous component to it."

Listen to Skip's band Voodoo 5.