Ragnar Hellspong
was born in Bromma on February 6, 1944. After finishing high school in 1963 he studied at
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm until 1967. From
1969 to 1976 he worked as a sales engineer in various industrial companies and from 1976 at
various managerial positions in the electrotechnical industry. Being self-employed since 1990,
he now runs his own software developing company. One of the programs he has developed is a
shareware Mail & Message Archiver
called "ForKeeps", which can be downloaded from
http://www.fkeeps.com. This program is
also available on a number of shareware sites on the Internet.
Ragnar has been playing the piano since the age of 6. In 1957 he began to play New Orleans jazz together with some of his classmates. His first real band was the "Wodka High Gang Gobblers", founded in 1959. They took part in a jazz band competition in 1959 and later that year changed their name to "San Jacinto Jassband". Between 1959 and 1962 they were the houseband at the "San Jacinto Jazz Club" in Abrahamsberg. During that period they participated in several jazz band competitions and performed at jazz clubs such as the "Gazell Club", "Bobbadilla" and "Club Pråm". In 1959 Ragnar bought his first ragtime folio at "Svala & Söderlund" in Stockholm. His first ragtime composition was "Rag's Rag" (unfortunately not written down), which he composed in 1963. Until 1990, he played with occasional bands (usually called "Red Peppers") and continued to play the piano (usually ragtime) in his spare time. In 1996 he composed a new "Rag's Rag", which is now available as a MIDI file on this webpage. Ragnar also has an amazing ragtime website of his own called Rag´s Rag - Free ragtime music and scores. There you will find his own arrangements of many old and new rags, entered note by note in Sibelius 6.0 score writing program and tranferred into MP3 format, as well as PDF scores for those pieces. |