Benny Green at Piedmont Piano Company
1728 San Pablo Ave, Oakland
April 5, 2025
It was never announced at Piedmont Piano earlier this month that it was pianist Benny Green’s birthday, but his solo concert there had a warm good-natured intimate feeling as if we’d all been invited to his home in Berkeley, the city that launched his international touring and recording career, for this occasion.
The thoughts that admiring bassist and colleague Christian McBride posted to Facebook two years ago could have served as program notes for this concert: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY to one of my dearest friends, brothers, and teachers, the great Benjamin Morris Wagner Green! I cannot believe you’ve hit the big Six-Oh while still looking almost exactly like you looked when we met, thirty-four years ago. How incredibly amazing — and annoying! ❤ I attribute your eternal youth to your eternal curiosity, your eternal quest to be the greatest musician you can be, your deep loving heart, and the latest and greatest reason for your light — your dear wife Sophie!”
Part of the bumper crop of musical greats to have graduated from Berkeley High School in the late ’70s and early ‘80s, Green still stands in these parts as something of a hometown hero, rightly regularly featured on the stage positioned between rows of grand pianos at Jim Callahan’s princely Piedmont Piano venue on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland. Callahan emceed as always, introducing both the pianist and the shop’s hand-built $200K Yamaha CFX on which he’d be performing. “I’ll take two of these!” Green responded, before launching into “A Minor Tale”, one of three of his original tunes in the set. As in much of what followed, Green shifted his strong left hand from serving as a walking bass accompaniment to stride, in symbiotic conversation with his dexterous right hand. The Birthday Boy seemed to have a lot of fun and listen very carefully to what was going down.
Benny Green takes a ride on Kenny Barron's "New York Attitude"
“My Girl Bill”, another of Green’s originals, displayed close but pretty voicings and forthright melody lines, sometimes propelled by the right hand at double speed, sometimes pairing both hands in canny unisons. The pianist’s affection for the creations of predecessor keyboardists was apparent in his gentle, minimalist approach to Fats Waller’s “Two Sleepy People”, and on Kenny Barron’s “New York Attitude”, about which Green quipped, “Anybody gotta problem with that?”. He treated the former with periods of stop time and artful deployment of the pedals and Barron’s felt like a breezy express ride up the West Side and on into Harlem.
As the concert progressed, listeners were more and more impressed with a state-of-the-art instrument that could sound responsive and clear to the dynamic demands of this kind of performer, including his Thelonious Monk-like fortissimo endings. “Pittsburgh Brethren” was chance to showcase independent solos from both right and left hands, and a soulful tribute to former his employers and mentors Art Blakey and Ray Brown, the name in reference to their birthplace.
Green served a satisfying amalgam of Strouse and Adams’ “Once Upon a Time” (from the 1962 musical, All American) with the Andante from The Bach Suite by Green’s major mentor, Oscar Peterson. The pop tune was ushered in lovingly, with a misty looseness of meter and pastel voicings; it was luminous and diaphanous. This was followed by two compositions by another famed pianist, Horace Silver. “Soulville” celebrated the bluesy soul sound which Silver and like minds brought to the Blue Note Records label in the ‘50s and ‘60s. As his left hand walked, Green’s right was free to explore phrasings and sometimes polytonal detours. I found myself thinking of how Green and Monk both worked so well in solo settings, where their deep love of the piano’s role as percussion, their facility in improvising melodic shapes and phrasings, and their all-too-rare sense of humor could reach listeners unobstructed. Silver’s “No Smokin’” proceeded rapidly and gorgeously.
“Love You Madly” was both a song by and a catch phrase of Duke Ellington. First recorded by Peterson in 1954 and presented by Green in bunches of succulent close intervals, it proceeded the evening’s closer, “It Might As Well Be Spring”. The Oscar-winning song by Rodgers and Hammerstein from State Fair was one of their only scores written solely for film rather than passing through a Broadway stage production. Perhaps Green’s gentlest embrace of the Yamaha keyboard, quiet, spare, and sweet, abiding mostly in the upper octaves, it elicited the luster of Rodgers’s compositional mastery, and reflected why Green has been an accompanist-of-choice for such singers as Betty Carter, Etta Jones, Diana Krall, and Mark Murphy.
It also made for a fitting internalized accompaniment as we walked back out into what was indeed a balmy, beauteous spring.
