Topic: Overlooked ragtime composer -- Bob Zurke
Recently I have discovered the piano music of Bob Zurke (born Boguslaw Albert Zukowski, 1912-1944). Zurke was an American jazz and ragtime pianist who spent his formative years in various groups around Detroit. In 1937, he replaced an ailing Joe Sullivan in the Bob Cats, a band led by Bob Crosby, Bing's younger brother. The new position greatly increased his national visibility, gaining an accolade from Jelly Roll Morton and winning a Downbeat Magazine readers' poll in 1938 for Best Band Pianist. He started his own Delta Rhythm Band, which made a couple of records, but by 1941 he was back in Los Angeles, the house pianist at the Hangover Club in Hollywood. Hard living caught up to him, and in February 1944, suffering from pneumonia, he collapsed while performing. He died the next day, the pneumonia complicated by alcohol poisoning.
Hangover Square (1939) is from Music for Moderns, a collection of eight Zurke piano solos. The images in this video were taken in Gleeson and Courtland, two ghost towns in southern Arizona.
