Ragtime, boogie-woogie, Harlem stride, blues, Latin-American dance tunes, and original compositions: Hoyle Osborne plays them all – with grace and feeling, eloquence, and a masterful style – elegant, and yet never afraid to get down, sometimes funky, always soulful.
His driving spirit evokes the great players of the past, and yet is uniquely his own. A consummate entertainer, he spices his performances with vivid stories of the music’s origins and its often-colorful creators.
Since 1990, Hoyle Osborne has made The Diamond Belle Saloon, in the historic Strater Hotel in Durango, Colorado, his home base. He has also appeared on the Mississippi River paddlewheel steamboat The Delta Queen, and has had extended engagements at La Posada de Albuquerque and the Silverado Country Club in California’s Napa Valley.
Live at The Diamond Belle captures Osborne on the job in an exciting hour of ragtime and boogie, including his own ragtime scorcher, “Shootin’ the Rapids,” all played on the saloon’s 1909 Steinway Vertegrand. The disc has been heard on public radio stations across the country. An earlier solo album, Swingcopation, is an engaging collection of ragtime, popular songs, and the Osborne originals “Salamander Shuffle” and “Eutopia.”
For more than twenty years, Hoyle Osborne has been partner and accompanist to singer and songwriter Jane Voss. They have recorded four albums together, been featured on several National Public Radio programs, and have performed at many major music festivals, for folk music and jazz societies, and in hundreds of concerts all across North America.
Born and raised in Austin, Texas, Hoyle Osborne grew up in a musically stimulating environment. His father was a professional swing trombone player through college years, and was active in music- related endeavors, such as Austin’s first FM station.
As a child, Osborne took piano lessons, played trombone in school bands, and learned folk music on the guitar. His father’s friend, the composer John Barnes Chance, gave the teen-aged Osborne a solid grounding in music theory and composition.
Later, during his college years at the University of Pennsylvania, Osborne had what he describes as a watershed experience: a DJ-colleague at WXPN, the college’s radio station, gave him a copy of The 86 Years of Eubie Blake, a recording of the brilliant, legendary ragtime and Harlem stride pianist who had been entertaining and composing since the beginning of the century. It was Osborne’s introduction to these classic and essential piano styles.
Eager for musical experiences of all kinds, he gained further inspiration from guitar lessons with folk-bluesman John Jackson, and a blues-piano introduction from Canadian singer Kate McGarrigle. Before long, he was evolving an approach to the piano that allowed him to fit right in with guitars, fiddles, and the like, not to mention singers.
In the early 1970s, a year of touring as accompanist to folksinger Rosalie Sorrels landed Osborne in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he found many varied musical outlets. He worked with veteran songwriters Malvina Reynolds and Gil Turner, accompanied British Music Hall singers, and played in several bands.
One of these, The Arkansas Sheiks, was a very popular folk-variety band, with whom Osborne played guitar, mandolin, pennywhistle, banjo, and piano, and recorded an album, Whiskey Before Breakfast (Bay).
In 1976, Osborne began performing with Jane Voss. They’ve been making music together ever since. Juxtaposing rare old blues and vaudeville songs with their own compositions, they “created their own hybrid of Bay-area folk-blues and jazz,” according to Sing Out! magazine. Their joint recording career got off to a great start with Get to the Heart (Green Linnet), which was honored with a Stereo Review Record of the Year Award. The magazine called the album “the essence of entertainment – without the claptrap – being simultaneously obvious and subtle, sympathetic and wicked, old-fashioned and right up to the minute.”
Their most recent project has been the new Jane Voss disc Farther Down the Road. Osborne produced and led the band, and also wrote several of the arrangements. Voss’s first all-original collection of songs, the disc has been receiving critical praise and airplay internationally.
In addition to their many performances for folk music festivals and concert series, Voss & Osborne have created historical concert-lectures, including 1912: A Musical Snapshot of America and The Ragtime Century. With assistance from the New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities and New Mexico Arts, they have presented these programs in schools, museums, and concert halls.
Meanwhile, Osborne keeps active as a composer. In addition to his neo-ragtime writing, he writes, arranges and produces music for theatre and video. Recent projects include the multi-image show Mesa Verde, for the national park; the outdoor summer drama Black River Traders in Farmington, N.M.; and the science exhibit, Contraptions A to Z, now showing in museums around the country.
