Max Morath, a Colorado Springs native who as a pianist and musical director championed ragtime music, and who around 1960 wrote, performed and co-produced 28 programs for public television in Denver entitled “The Ragtime Era,” died June 19 in Duluth, Minn. He was 96.
Morath’s career in music and entertainment spanned eight decades, including his watershed program — The Ragtime Era — created at the Denver Educational Television Station KRMA as part of the 60-station National Educational Television network, the predecessor of PBS, according to the New York Times.
With the program, now considered a genre classic, “Max pioneered a new concept for American educational TV illustrating that information can also entertain,” according to The Syncopated Times. “That was the essence of his work, that and informing the public about an important era of America’s popular culture.”
Morath was widely know as “Mr. Ragtime.”
Born Oct. 1, 1926, Morath as a child studied piano and harmony while mastering the rudiments of ragtime piano taught to him by his mother, Gladys Morath, who was a silent film piano player in Colorado, according to Kyle Cooke, Rocky Mountain PBS.
Morath grew up in Colorado Springs, where his first job as a 17-year-old radio announcer at KVOR in that city launched his professional life in media and theatre, according to Morath’s obituary on Legacy.com.
A 1948 graduate of Colorado College, with a bachelor of arts in English, Morath also graduated from the Stanford-NBC Radio and Television Institute in1951. He went on to perform as a pianist and musical director for melodrama companies in Cripple Creek and Durango.
Morath was cherished by the ragtime music community, and was close with greats of the genre, according to Jay Gabler, Forum News Service. While his advocacy buoyed the music’s public awareness and helped spur the ragtime revival that included movies like “The Sting,” Morath acknowledged that “I owe a debt more than I can articulate” to the Black artists who created the genre.
In 1963, Morath and his family moved to New York, where he made his “nightclub debut at the historic Blue Angel that year, followed by an extended run in 1964 at the Village Vanguard with his Original Rag Quartet,” according to Legacy.com. Morath continued to appear on PBS and he was a long running musical guest on National Public Radio (NPR).
When Morath retired from touring in 2005, he had performed live at more than 5,000 theaters, clubs and colleges. In 2008, Morath published a novel based on the life and work of the American composer Carrie Jacobs-Bond. Over the course of his long career Morath was recognized by the Nashville Film Festival in 2015 as screenplay writer for his work “Blind Boone,” written in collaboration with Moss Hall. In 2016, Morath, who was recognized as a distinguished alumnus of Colorado College, was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame. At age 91 he concluded his second career as a lecturer at the Sacramento Ragtime Festival in November 2017.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Max Morath Music Scholarship, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn. A funeral service will be held at 1 p.m. Thursday at First Lutheran Church Duluth and the service will be live-streamed.
