Zez Confrey

Edward Elzear "Zez" Confrey was born in Peru, IL, and began to play piano at the tender age of four. Maturing rapidly, Confrey was already leading his own dance band in high school. Post-graduation, Confrey undertook a course of study in serious music at the Chicago Musical College and there became enamored of the French Impressionists, whose "modernistic" sense of harmony would play a key role in his work as a composer and pianist. In 1915, Confrey took his first professional job as a music demonstrator in the Chicago office of Harry von Tilzer's company, and there published his first songs. In 1917 Confrey joined the U.S. Navy, but got no closer to the front lines than playing in a Navy-sponsored revue called Leave It to the Sailors. During this run, Confrey cut his first piano roll for the Imperial Company, a song from the show called "Over the Top." Upon discharge from the Navy, Zez Confrey joined the QRS piano-roll company as a pianist and roll editor. Confrey would make nearly 200 piano rolls during his lifetime, mostly editing them himself. Zez Confrey was regarded as one of the sharpest roll editors in the business, especially when it came to his own compositions. One of his first QRS rolls was an original number entitled "My Pet," and with this work Zez Confrey single-handedly ushered in the field of novelty ragtime, a style that took on structural features of French Impressionism and did not suffer amateur pianists gladly (although they were nonetheless welcome to try!). In 1921, Confrey scored a huge hit with "Kitten on the Keys," which sold over a million sheet-music copies and made Zez Confrey a household name in popular music; over time, "Kitten on the Keys" would become the third most-frequently recorded rag in history, after Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf...