Tape Land 198 – Polar Lion Compendium (5/16/26)
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2:02:45 – Welcome to Tape Land! On each episode, I’ll present the audio of a cassette tape or historic material from my personal archives.
My synthesizer versions of old ragtime songs are finally collected in one place!
Polar Lion (an anagram of “piano roll”) began when I discovered the website pianola.co.nz, which had a huge collection of old piano rolls, from over 100 years ago, converted to MIDI files. I was able to load the MIDI files into the music program Reason to create a unique sound for the music, and the Polar Lion project was born.
I released the first 14 songs directly on Onsug.com, and after that I presented the songs on The Overnightscape. I would work on the project on and off over the years, producing 38 songs. I figured it was time to collect them all in one place, and here they all are, in Polar Lion Compendium.
The final track in the collection, A Bunch of Rags, is brand new, and presented here for the first time. I was very happy with how that one came out.
Polar Lion has such a unique sound, I really hope more people can listen to and enjoy the songs. And of course, a big thank you to the Pianola site for converting the songs to digital form – not to mention all the composers and performers who originally created the music way back when!
Download the songs individually: Polar_Lion_Compendium.zip
Track listing (the date shown is the first time the song appeared on onsug.com):
[01] 00:00:00 – Palm Leaf Rag (4/27/10) 2:51
[02] 00:02:51 – Dear Old Southland (4/29/10) 3:04
[03] 00:05:55 – Three O’Clock In The Morning (5/2/10) 3:19
[04] 00:09:14 – Ukelele Lady (5/5/10) 2:59
[05] 00:12:13 – African Hunter (5/5/10) 2:28
[06] 00:14:41 – Battle of the Nations (5/8/10) 5:42
[07] 00:20:23 – Bolo Rag (5/8/10) 3:18
[08] 00:23:41 – Saw Mill River Road (5/11/10) 4:32
[09] 00:28:13 – La Seduccion (5/12/10) 3:09
[10] 00:31:22 – Sky Rockets Rag (5/15/10) 2:41
[11] 00:34:03 – Alcoholic Blues (5/18/10) 3:04
[12] 00:37:07 – Big Mose Blues (5/22/10) 2:42
[13] 00:39:49 – Cum-Bac Rag (5/27/10) 2:39
[14] 00:42:28 – In My Mercer Racing Car (5/29/10) 3:48
[15] 00:46:16 – Polar Bear Man (12/31/12) 2:08
[16] 00:48:24 – Woodland Sketches (1/4/13) 1:46
[17] 00:50:10 – 29th and Dearborn (1/10/13) 3:05
[18] 00:53:15 – Invitation Rag (2/15/13) 1:52
[19] 00:55:07 – Floatin’ Down To Cotton Town (2/27/13) 2:29
[20] 00:57:36 – 12th Street Rag (3/5/13) 4:24
[21] 01:02:00 – Come Back To Arizona (3/26/13) 1:58
[22] 01:03:58 – Musical Steeplechase (4/3/13) 5:40
[23] 01:09:38 – Follies of 1911 (6/5/13) 5:46
[24] 01:15:24 – Black Snake Blues (6/21/13) 2:10
[25] 01:17:34 – Unidentified Rag Medley (8/3/18) 4:07
[26] 01:21:41 – Yellow Dog Rag (8/16/18) 1:42
[27] 01:23:23 – Poison Ivy Rag (11/2/18) 2:12
[28] 01:25:35 – Red Pepper – A Spicy Rag (6/4/19) 2:24
[29] 01:27:59 – The Electric Girl – One Step (6/23/20) 2:26
[30] 01:30:25 – Texas Foxtrot (7/30/20) 2:58
[31] 01:33:23 – Maple Leaf Rag (9/1/20) 8:38
[32] 01:42:01 – Bug House Fables (9/15/20) 3:12
[33] 01:45:13 – Huckleberry Finn (10/1/20) 2:04
[34] 01:47:17 – Too Much Mustard (3/5/21) 2:30
[35] 01:49:47 – Moonlight On The Ganges (4/9/21) 3:02
[36] 01:52:49 – Bohemia Rag (2/28/23) 3:16
[37] 01:56:05 – The Shell Shock Shake (5/12/26) 2:43
[38] 01:58:48 – A Bunch of Rags (Rhapsody Rag, Maple Leaf Rag, Dandelion) (5/16/22) 3:57
License for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC License for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Attribution: by Polar Lion (Frank Edward Nora) – more info at onsug.com
