Glenn Jenks: The Complete Ragtime Works for Piano, Volume 2 continues the exploration of one of the most distinctive voices in modern ragtime. Spanning the years 1987 to 2014, this second volume follows Jenks through the mature and later stages of his creative life, revealing a composer whose imagination continued to deepen and expand over nearly three decades.

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Born in Boston in 1947, Glenn Jenks created a body of 34 original piano rags that both honors the traditions of classic ragtime and pushes beyond them. His music is immediately engaging, yet often harmonically adventurous, blending syncopated rhythms, lyrical melodies, unexpected turns, and a distinctly contemporary sensibility. Rather than simply recreating the sound of an earlier era, Jenks treated ragtime as a living musical language—one capable of wit, tenderness, sophistication, and remarkable expressive variety.

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The works on Volume 2 show Jenks at the height of his creative powers. Here, the familiar architecture of ragtime becomes a canvas for increasingly personal ideas, with pieces that can be exuberant and playful one moment, reflective and deeply lyrical the next. Throughout, Jenks’s unmistakable voice remains at the center: inventive, elegant, and full of character.

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Together with Volume 1, Glenn Jenks: The Complete Ragtime Works for Piano, Volume 2 completes a rare recorded survey of a remarkable American composer whose music deserves a far wider audience. For listeners who love ragtime—as well as anyone drawn to imaginative and beautifully crafted piano music—these later works offer a compelling portrait of an artist who continued to find new possibilities within the genre until the end of his composing life.