"Rose Blossoms"

Here is "Rose Blossoms" written in 1992 by the young, contemporary ragtime performer/composer Tom Brier.

In the liner notes of Tom's debut CD, "Rising Star", Elliot Adams writes: "ROSE BLOSSOMS is a beautiful example of how Tom can mold the classic rag style of Joseph Lamb into something altogether new."

"Tom was born October 3, 1971, in Oakdale, California, a farming community in the Great Central Valley south of Sacramento. When he was four, his parents bought an old Schubert mechanical player piano, and soon he was picking out tunes he heard on the piano rolls. Aware that their son had talent, his parents enrolled him with a local piano teacher when he was five, and in a short time he was composing and notating his own music."

"In 1985 he came to the attention of Larry Applegate, then the president of the Sacramento Ragtime Society. Tom was invited to play at a meeting and immediately blew everyone away with his aggressive and articulate renderings of early ragtime classics. But what amazed everyone was his depth of understanding of the early ragtime styles. His own compositions already embodied many of the subtleties of ragtime, yet were remarkably original - and all this when he was only fourteen years old. Unbelieveably, he has only gotten better since then."