J. Lawrence Cook

J. Lawrence Cook is a historic name in ragtime and other piano styles from the early 20th century. His name shows up as an arranger and sometimes composer on stacks of sheet music from this period, he wrote several of the best analytical studies of ragtime, and, most importantly, he turned out a series of piano rolls that, according to some documentation, number in the tens of thousands. An important aspect of Cook's job was to figure out the exact recipe of pianists such as Fats Waller or Jelly Roll Morton, players whose virtuoso extemporization left many other arrangers scratching their heads, if not banging them against the piano bench. Existing transcriptions of performances by Morton and Waller are quite often done by Cook, but the latter man also had a distinctly personal side to his work, evidenced by an entry in the unfinished A Survey of Jazz Transitions by Joe Davis which demonstrates J. Lawrence Cook's original interpretation of the tune "Christopher Columbus" before going on to demonstrate how Waller might have played it. Cook was an orphan before he was four years old; luckily, he was raised by relatives who introduced him to music early on. He attended Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, an Augusta, GA, boarding school founded by noted African-American educator Lucy Craft Laney. By 1919, Cook had finished his college prepatory courses as well as a good deal of piano study, and was developing an interest in the mechanized player-piano technology, including instruments such as the Nickelodeon. In his early twenties he saved enough funds to buy a machine known as a perforator, which did just what it sounded like it would do -- make little holes in a roll of paper in conjunction with the musical content of a piano solo. Ragtime master Eubie Blake...