J. Lawrence Cook

J. Lawrence Cook is a historic name in ragtime and other piano styles from the early 20th century. His name shows up as an arranger and sometimes composer on stacks of sheet music from this period, he wrote several of the best analytical studies of ragtime, and, most importantly, he turned out a series of piano rolls that, according to some documentation, number in the tens of thousands. An important aspect of Cook's job was to figure out the exact recipe of pianists such as Fats Waller or Jelly Roll Morton, players whose virtuoso extemporization left many other arrangers scra...