Glenn Jenks (1947–2016) was one of ragtime’s most distinctive modern voices—a composer who understood the tradition deeply enough to honor it, yet possessed the imagination to take it somewhere entirely his own.

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Born in Boston and active as a pianist, composer, teacher, and performer, Jenks devoted much of his creative life to exploring the possibilities of syncopated piano music. Across more than four decades, he composed 34 works for solo piano that draw upon the rhythmic vitality and formal elegance of classic ragtime while introducing unexpected harmonies, lyrical melodies, stylistic detours, and a distinctly twentieth-century musical sensibility.

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Glenn Jenks: The Complete Ragtime Works for Piano, Vol I brings this remarkable body of music together in its entirety. Volume 1 traces the first fourteen years of Jenks’s development as a ragtime composer, from his earliest works of 1972 through the increasingly assured and individual music of 1986.

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What emerges is far more than an exercise in nostalgia. Jenks treats ragtime as a living musical language. Familiar syncopations coexist with surprising harmonic turns; elegant melodies unfold alongside moments of wit, melancholy, tenderness, and exuberance. Some pieces look affectionately toward the great ragtime composers of the past, while others stretch the style into musical territory that could only belong to Jenks.

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Taken together, these works reveal a composer of enormous curiosity and personality—one who continually found new possibilities within a form that others might have considered finished.

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This recording is both a celebration and a preservation of that achievement: an opportunity to encounter the music of Glenn Jenks not as a historical footnote, but as the work of an important and original American composer whose remarkable contribution to the ragtime tradition deserves to be heard.