Study Joplin’s Peacherine Rag in E flat. The left hand leaps between a bass note on the beat and a chord off the beat while the right hand syncopates against it: keep the bass steady and the right hand’s tied off-beats crisp over it. Ragtime is played with even, straight eighths and sixteenths, not swung (the rag is marked “Not too fast”); the swing card shows the jazz feel that grew out of ragtime, for the swing pieces ahead. At the keyboard: play a ragtime bass pattern.