Ragtime Festival Artists

Mimi Blais

Mimi Blais, from Montreal, Quebec, has been lauded as the female Victor Borge, the Celine Dion of the keyboard, and the New Queen of Ragtime. Classically trained at the Quebec Conservatory of Music and Montreal's McGill University and making her second appearance with the Charles Templeton Ragtime Music Festival, Blais blends classical, folk, jazz, modern, blues, tango, and ragtime into an awesome harmonious whole.

Marty Eggers

Well known on the West Coast as a veritable "encylclopedia of ragtime and early jazz repetoire," Marty Eggers has played with numerous San Francisco Bay Area jazz and ragtime groups. He is a skilled composer and arranger of ragtime and traditional jazz and appears often with his wife, Virginia Tichenor, and her father, ragtime great Trebor Tichenor, in the Tichenor Family Trio.

Frederick Hodges

California native Frederick Hodges specializes in the piano music and popular songs of the ragtime era, the 1920s, and the 1930s. For more than twenty years now, Frederick Hodges has performed solo, with jazz ensembles, with the Peter Mintun Orchestra, and with the Royal Society Jazz Orchestra on stage, television, and radio. He has entertained royalty, stars of stage and screen, captains of industry, and even Tin Pan Alley composers. Frederick Hodges is also an accomplished professional silent film accompanist, appearing monthly at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, other theaters around the county, and at international silent film festivals. He is a favorite at jazz and ragtime festivals around the country.

Brian Holland

Brian Holland has rapidly become one of the most lauded performers of ragtime and stride piano in America. Constantly developing new and exciting styles of performance, Brian enthralls audiences by combining impressively dexterous pyrotechnics with a very laid-back approach. The result is remarkable accuracy and flair with seemingly little or no effort.

David Jasen

A leading authority on and a well-known collector of books, recordings, piano rolls, periodicals, catalogues and sheet music dealing in all areas of American popular music, David Jasen is a treasure - to the world of ragtime and to the Charles Templeton Ragtime Music Festival. Jasen's extraordinary private collection has been prized alongside those of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the City University of New York.

David Reffkin

David Reffkin is founder and co-director of the Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival, contributing editor and reviewer for The Mississippi Rag, a proofreader for books and articles written by the country's leading authors on ragtime, and, since 1981, the producer and host of "The Ragtime Machine," a weekly program of ragtime music, news, and interviews in San Francisco.

Bob Seeley

Universally hailed as America's greatest living boogie woogie pianist and proponent of stride, Bob Seeley is "a piano player like Mickey Mantle was a ball player." A fixture at the piano bar at Charlie's Crab in Troy, MI, Seeley has been entertaining for 30 years and presents a repertoire of piano music spanning the entire 20th century.

Virginia Tichenor

Making her second appearance at the Charles Templeton Ragtime Music Festival, Virginia Tichenor is daughter of ragtime scholar Trebor Tichenor and past-president of the West Coast Ragtime Society. Wife of bassist and pianist Marty Eggers, Tichenor plays gigs with the Tichenor Family Trio, California's Devil Mountain Jazz Band, and as a solo pianist at festivals throughout the country.