“Don’t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.” Scott Joplin

Rag Bag is a montage, some pieces of cloth sewn together. It shouldn’t feel symmetrical, polished or finalised. When I was assembling it, I remember that tingling feeling, as if I was going on a journey. From now on I want to carry this rag bag with me in all weathers, fill it to bursting, then mend it again, add to it, change it ... and never wash it, please don’t ever wash it!

Ragtime was my original route into jazz, and what still fascinates me about this music today is that it is so warm, life-affirming and authentic. I love early jazz because it brims with vitality and straightforward joy. It’s like children’s laughter: open-hearted, unconfined, unashamed. This emotional candour is something which neither a piano roll nor strict note-for-note copying could ever express.

My improvisations are also about contradictions and contrasts, about rifts in time, syncopations in life. A patchwork of different motifs and styles, of associations and loose thoughts about ragtime and about the colours and scents of the late 19th century. Echoes of Scott Joplin form a recurring basic motif: his appealing, well-organised compositions always seem so blissfully unconnected to his tragic life.

- Bernd Lhotzky