Zez Confrey
Updated: Oct 10
Few pianists could make a piano sound quite as mischievous as Zez Confrey. With his dazzling fingerwork, unexpected harmonies, playful melodies, and seemingly impossible rhythms, Confrey helped transform ragtime into something entirely new. His compositions could sound like a runaway player piano, a musical practical joke, or an entire orchestra squeezed into eighty-eight keys. Yet beneath all the humor and dazzling virtuosity was a thoroughly trained musician with a sophisticated understanding of harmony and an extraordinary imagination.
Edward Elzear "Zez" Confrey was born on April 3, 1895, in Peru, Illinois, just as ragtime was beginning to take shape. He would become one of the most celebrated figures in novelty piano, a uniquely American musical style that combined the syncopation of ragtime, the sophistication of classical music, and the rhythmic excitement of the emerging jazz age.
His most famous compositions, including Kitten on the Keys and Dizzy Fingers, became sensations during the Roaring Twenties. But Confrey's remarkable career extended far beyond those familiar showpieces, encompassing popular songs, orchestral arrangements, piano rolls, and more than a hundred compositions.
A Four-Year-Old at the Keyboard
Confrey's musical gifts revealed themselves almost as soon as he could reach the piano.
Growing up in a musical household, young Zez was particularly fascinated by his older brother Jim, an accomplished musician who could play several instruments. According to accounts of his childhood, four-year-old Zez once listened to his brother practice a piano piece and then climbed onto the bench and reproduced what he had heard. His parents quickly recognized that this was no ordinary childhood talent, and formal piano lessons soon followed.
By high school, Confrey was already performing professionally and leading his own orchestra. Although his future seemed destined to involve music, his early ambitions were considerably more traditional than the career he would eventually pursue. He wanted to become a classical concert pianist.
After graduating from high school, Confrey enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, where he received extensive classical training. He was especially drawn to the music of French Impressionist composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Their colorful harmonies, unusual chord progressions, and atmospheric effects fascinated him.
These influences would eventually become essential ingredients in his own compositions. While the rhythmic foundation of Confrey's music came largely from ragtime, its harmonic imagination often reflected the sophisticated European music he had studied.
It was an unusual combination, but one that would help him develop a style instantly recognizable as his own.
From Classical Ambitions to Show Business
Although Confrey possessed the technique necessary for a concert career, he gradually discovered that composing offered him greater opportunities for creative expression.
His older brother Jim encouraged him to pursue composition, and by 1915 Confrey was working in Chicago's thriving popular-music business. He initially demonstrated songs for the music publisher Harry von Tilzer, then became a staff pianist for the Witmark publishing company.
These jobs placed him directly in the bustling world of Tin Pan Alley, where publishers competed to produce the next national hit and talented pianists were expected to perform practically anything placed before them.
Then came World War I.
In 1917, Confrey enlisted in the United States Navy. His service, however, took an unexpectedly entertaining direction. Rather than spending much of his time aboard a warship, he performed in a Navy-sponsored theatrical revue called Leave It to the Sailors, entertaining servicemen with music and comedy.
One of his fellow performers was a young violinist from Waukegan, Illinois, named Benjamin Kubelsky.
Kubelsky had considerable musical talent, but audiences increasingly responded to the jokes he told between numbers. Eventually he traded his ambitions as a serious violinist for a career in comedy, adopting the stage name Jack Benny.
Yes, the future radio and television comedy legend Jack Benny once shared a stage with Zez Confrey.
Confrey's Navy years also introduced him to another medium that would prove enormously important to his career: the player-piano roll.
A New Musical Style: Novelty Piano
The player piano was one of the great entertainment technologies of the early twentieth century. Before radios and phonographs became fixtures in American homes, mechanically operated pianos could reproduce performances encoded on long rolls of perforated paper.
For skilled pianists and arrangers, this technology opened exciting possibilities. Piano rolls could contain complicated arrangements, rapid passages, and rhythmic effects that sometimes seemed to defy what two human hands could accomplish.
Confrey became fascinated by these possibilities.
After the war, he joined the QRS piano-roll company as a pianist and arranger. Over his career, he produced nearly 200 piano rolls, many of which he painstakingly edited himself.
His work with these mechanical instruments helped shape what became known as novelty piano.
While traditional ragtime generally relied on a steady left-hand accompaniment supporting syncopated melodies, novelty piano took the formula several steps further. Composers introduced rapid repeated notes, unexpected accents, chromatic runs, unusual harmonies, and intricate rhythmic patterns that could make the music sound almost impossibly complicated.
Confrey was especially skilled at combining extraordinary technical demands with an irresistible sense of humor.
His music could race across the keyboard at breakneck speed, suddenly stop, change direction, or launch into a completely unexpected passage. Frequently, his compositions gave the impression that several musical ideas were competing for attention at once.
Yet the apparent chaos was carefully organized. Many of his most difficult-sounding passages were built around ingenious finger patterns and keyboard positions that made them more manageable than they initially appeared.
Nevertheless, amateur pianists who purchased his sheet music often discovered that their enthusiasm exceeded their technical abilities!
The Kitten That Conquered America
In 1921, Confrey published the composition that would make him a household name: Kitten on the Keys.
The inspiration was wonderfully ordinary.
According to a frequently repeated story, Confrey heard his grandmother's cat walking across the keys of her piano. The resulting jumble of notes suggested the idea for a musical depiction of a kitten exploring the keyboard.
What emerged was anything but ordinary.
Kitten on the Keys bursts with restless energy, playful dissonances, sudden changes of direction, and rapid passages that seem to tumble over one another. The music evokes a curious kitten scampering across the keyboard, getting into trouble, and generally refusing to behave.
Audiences loved it.
Published in 1921, the piece sold more than a million copies of sheet music and quickly became one of the defining piano compositions of the decade. Pianists everywhere wanted to play it, and listeners were captivated by its combination of humor and breathtaking virtuosity.
The success transformed Confrey into a national celebrity.
Other novelty-piano hits followed, including My Pet (1921), Stumbling (1922), Coaxing the Piano (1922), and the spectacular Dizzy Fingers (1923).
The titles themselves reveal something about Confrey's musical personality. He approached composition with a spirit of playfulness, often giving his pieces names that suggested mechanical mishaps, humorous situations, or the frantic activity of fingers struggling to keep up with the music.
And although Kitten on the Keys was his greatest commercial triumph, Dizzy Fingers became nearly as synonymous with his name. Its racing passages, crisp articulation, and rhythmic ingenuity made it a favorite among virtuoso pianists eager to demonstrate their technical command.
Confrey even attempted to teach others how to reproduce his keyboard wizardry. In 1923, he published Zez Confrey's Modern Course in Novelty Piano Playing, an instructional book explaining the techniques behind his remarkable style. It proved sufficiently popular to remain in print for decades.
Sharing the Spotlight with George Gershwin
Perhaps the greatest indication of Confrey's celebrity came on February 12, 1924.
On that day, bandleader Paul Whiteman presented an ambitious concert at New York City's Aeolian Hall entitled An Experiment in Modern Music. Whiteman hoped to demonstrate that jazz and popular music could possess the sophistication and artistic importance of classical concert music.
The event would become one of the most famous concerts in American musical history.
Its program featured a remarkable collection of composers and performers, including Irving Berlin, Victor Herbert, George Gershwin, and Zez Confrey.
Today, the concert is remembered primarily for the world premiere of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, with Gershwin himself at the piano.
But there is an interesting historical twist: Confrey was already such a major celebrity that promotional material for the concert placed his name ahead of Gershwin's.
Confrey performed his famous Kitten on the Keys, dazzling an audience that included many of New York's most influential musicians and critics.
For a brief moment, Confrey and Gershwin stood side by side as two of the most exciting figures in American popular music, each demonstrating a different way of combining classical sophistication with distinctly American rhythms.
Gershwin would eventually achieve a level of international recognition that far surpassed Confrey's. Nevertheless, the 1924 concert captured Confrey at the height of his fame, when his keyboard innovations were helping redefine what American piano music could sound like.
Beyond the Roaring Twenties
The extraordinary popularity of novelty piano was closely connected to the musical tastes and technologies of the 1920s. As the decade ended, those tastes began to change.
Jazz orchestras, crooners, radio broadcasts, and the rapidly developing recording industry increasingly dominated popular entertainment. The piano-roll business, once a major force in American musical life, gradually lost much of its commercial importance.
Confrey adapted by turning more of his attention to popular songwriting and composing for jazz and dance bands. He also led his own orchestra, made recordings, and continued working as a professional pianist.
His compositions were issued by major recording companies, including Victor, Brunswick, and Edison, introducing his music to audiences far beyond those who purchased sheet music or piano rolls.
The Great Depression, however, created financial difficulties throughout the entertainment business. Confrey's career was no longer accompanied by the extraordinary publicity and commercial success he had enjoyed earlier in the decade.
In 1932, he married Wilhelmina Matthes, a former showgirl. The couple eventually had two sons, Paul and Thomas, and settled in New York.
Although his public prominence declined, Confrey remained active as a musician and composer. The 1940 census listed him as a hotel musician, while his 1942 draft registration identified him as a freelance composer.
He also made occasional appearances in other forms of entertainment. One particularly unusual example was the 1937 Vitaphone short film Home Run on the Keys, in which he appeared alongside legendary baseball player Babe Ruth.
It was an unlikely pairing of two celebrities whose greatest fame had come during the exuberant 1920s.
A Difficult Final Chapter
During the 1940s, Confrey developed Parkinson's disease, a progressive neurological disorder that would increasingly interfere with his ability to perform.
For a pianist whose reputation rested on extraordinary finger control, rapid movements, and seemingly effortless technical brilliance, the illness was particularly devastating.
As the disease progressed, public performances became increasingly difficult, eventually forcing him to withdraw from the concert stage.
Yet Confrey's musical imagination remained active.
Although he largely retired from professional musical life after World War II, he continued writing intermittently, producing some of his final compositions in the late 1950s. His later works revealed a composer whose interests extended beyond the novelty-piano genre that had made him famous.
Meanwhile, the popular-music world was beginning to rediscover some of his earlier achievements.
During the 1950s, a renewed enthusiasm for honky-tonk and old-fashioned piano styles brought Kitten on the Keys, Dizzy Fingers, and other Confrey favorites back into circulation.
Pianists such as Lou Busch, Ray Turner, and Dick Hyman helped introduce these compositions to new audiences. Their recordings demonstrated that Confrey's music had lost none of its energy, humor, or technical excitement.
Unfortunately, Confrey's declining health prevented him from participating fully in this renewed interest in his work.
He died on November 22, 1971, in Lakewood, New Jersey, at the age of 76, after many years of struggling with Parkinson's disease.
A Legacy That Continues to Surprise
Confrey's death came just as America was beginning to experience a major revival of interest in ragtime.
The enormous success of the 1973 film The Sting, with its memorable use of Scott Joplin's music, would soon help introduce ragtime to millions of new listeners. This renewed enthusiasm also encouraged musicians, publishers, and historians to revisit the extraordinary variety of American piano music written during the early twentieth century.
Confrey's compositions benefited from this rediscovery. In 1982, a substantial collection of his piano works was published, helping preserve music that might otherwise have remained inaccessible to future performers.
His legacy encompasses more than a hundred compositions, including piano solos, popular songs, instructional works, and miniature operas, along with an extensive collection of piano rolls and recordings.
But perhaps his most important achievement was the way he helped expand the possibilities of ragtime.
Confrey demonstrated that syncopated popular piano music could be technically demanding, harmonically adventurous, and brilliantly inventive without sacrificing its appeal to ordinary listeners. His works occupy a fascinating musical territory somewhere between Scott Joplin's ragtime, the elegant harmonies of Debussy and Ravel, and the rhythmic experimentation of early jazz.
For pianists, his compositions remain exhilarating challenges. For audiences, they are irresistible entertainments.
And for anyone interested in the extraordinary diversity of American piano music, Zez Confrey represents a wonderfully imaginative chapter in its history.
More than a century after Kitten on the Keys first delighted audiences, its infectious humor and dazzling keyboard acrobatics remain as fresh as ever.
Zez Confrey understood something essential about music: extraordinary technical skill and a playful sense of humor make a delightful combination.
Selected Performances
Impromptu (1923) - Here's a performance of "Impromptu" from Zez Confrey's wonderful piano suite titled "Three Little Oddities." While Confrey was better known for his novelty piano pieces, this unusual impressionistic composition showcases his more classical side, and reminds me of Debussy or Ravel.
Novelette (1923) - Novelette is the second piece in Confrey's "Three Little Oddities" piano suite. It showcases his ability to write in a more classical vein. It's a beautiful number that evokes a gentle impressionistic mood.
Romanza (1923) - Romanza is the third piece in Zez Confrey's "Three Little Oddities" piano suite, written in 1923. I find the title of the suite a bit misleading. These aren't oddities, but rather, beautiful impressionistic miniatures for the piano. While Confrey is better known for his novelty piano pieces, "Three Little Oddities" showcases a more classical style.
Locating The Music
Confrey's music is easily found online at sites such as Sheet Music Plus and Amazon.
Compositions for Piano
My Pet (1921)
Kitten on the Keys (1921)
You Tell 'em Ivories (1921)
Poor Buttermilk (1921)
Greenwich Witch (1921)
Stumbling (1922)
Coaxing the Piano (1922)
Dumbell (1922)
Tricks (1922)
Nickel in the Slot (1923)
Dizzy Fingers (1923)
Three Little Oddities (1923)
Impromptu
Romanza
Novelette
African Suite (1924)
High Hattin
Kinda Careless
Mississippi Shivers
Anticipation (1924)
Charleston Chuckles (1925)
Fantasy – Jazz Arrangement (1925)
Humorestless (1925)
Flower Song (1925)
Spring Song (1925)
Home Sweet Home (1925)
Melody in F (1925)
Traumerei (1925)
Fantasy (1926)
Jay Walk (1927)
Jack in the Box (1927)
Walse Mirage (1927)
Sparkling Waters (1928)
Concert Etude (1929)
Heaven's Garden (1931)
Moods of a New Yorker (1932)
At Dusk
Movie Ballet
Relaxation
After Theatre – Tango
Buffoon (1932)
Champagne (1932)
Desert Dance (1932)
In the South of France (1932)
Indian Prayer (1932)
Phantom Cadets (1932)
Wistfullness (1932)
Grandfather's Clock (1933)
Sittin' on a Log Pettin' My Dog (1933)
Smart Alec (1933)
Giddy Ditty (1935)
Rhythm Venture (1935)
Arabian Maid (1935)
A Heart Like the Ocean (1935)
Lullaby from Mars (1935)
Mouses' Hooves (1935)
Tin Pan Symphony (1935)
The Birds' Carnival (1935)
Blue Tornado (1935)
Rag Doll Dimples (1935)
Audacity (1936)
Meandering (1936)
Tap Dance of the Chimes (1936)
Ultra-Ultra (1936)
Oriental Fantasy (1936)
Home-Run on the Keys (1936)
Midsummer's Nightmare (1936)
Motif Du Concert (1936)
Wise Cracker Suite (1936)
Yokel Opus
Mighty Lackawanna
The Sheriff's Lament
Sugar Dance (1936)
Sunshine from the Fingers (1936)
Sport Model Encore (1937)
The Hobble De Hoy (1938)
Della Robbia (1938)
That Old Piano Roll Band (1943)
Dancing Shadow (1944)
Elihu's Harmonica (1944)
Parade of the Jumping Beans (1944)
Pickle Pepper Polka (1944)
Tune For Mademoiselle (1944)
Amazonia (1945)
Butterfly (1945)
Flutter By, Butterfly (1945)
Rag Doll Carnival (1945)
Four Candy Pieces (1949)
Song of Thanksgiving (1952)
Four Circus Pieces (1959)
Fourth Dimension (1959)
