Aaron Diehl | PianoWednesday, July 21, 2021 | 7:30PM

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AARON DIEHL Piano

Wednesday, July 21, 2021 | 7:30pmHerbst Theatre

STILL Seven Traceries Cloud Castles Mystic Pool Muted Laughter Out of the Silence Woven Silver Wailing Dawn A Bit of Wit

HANNA Century Rag

SMITH Fading Star

JOHNSON Keep Off the Grass

GUESS J-Walking

ELLINGTON New World A-Comin’

DETT Juba Dance

Aaron Diehl is represented by Opus 3 Artists 470 Park Ave. South, 9th Fl. North, New York, NY 10016 opus3artists.com

Hamburg Steinway Model D, Pro Piano, San Francisco

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ARTIST PROFILE

Tonight, we present the San Francisco Performances debut of Aar-on Diehl.

Pianist and composer Aaron Diehl mystifies listeners with his layered artistry. At once temporal and ethereal, his ex-pression transforms the piano into an orchestral vessel in the spirit of beloved predecessors Ahmad Jamal, Erroll Garner and Jelly Roll Morton. Following three critically acclaimed leader albums on Mack Avenue Records—and live appear-ances at historic venues from Jazz at Lincoln Center and The Village Vanguard to New York Philharmonic and the Philhar-monie de Paris—the American Pianist Association’s 2011 Cole Porter fellow now focuses his attention on what it means to be present within himself. His forthcoming solo record prom-ises an expansion of that exploration in a setting at once un-bound and intimate.

Aaron conjures three-dimensional expansion of melo-dy, counterpoint and movement through time. Rather than choose one sound or another, he invites listeners into the chambered whole of his artistry. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Aaron traveled to New York in 2003, following his success as a finalist in JALC’s Essentially Ellington competition and a subsequent European tour with Wynton Marsalis. His love affair with rub and tension prompted a years-long immer-sion in distinctive repertoire from Monk and Ravel to Gersh-win and William Grant Still. Among other towering figures, Still in particular inspires Aaron’s ongoing curation of Black American composers in his own performance programming, unveiled this past fall at 92nd St. Y.

Aaron has enjoyed artistic associations with Wynton Mar-salis, Benny Golson, Jimmy Heath, Buster Williams, Branford Marsalis, Wycliffe Gordon, Philip Glass and multi-Grammy award-winning artist Cecile McLorin Salvant. He recently ap-peared with the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra as featured soloist.

Aaron holds a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies from Juil-

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liard. A licensed pilot, when he’s not at the studio or on the road, he’s likely in the air. Follow both his earthbound and ae-rial exploits via Instagram at instagram.com/aaronjdiehl.

PROGRAM NOTES

Seven Traceries

WILLIAM GRANT STILL(1895–1978)

Born in Woodville, Mississippi, William Grant Still grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, where his mother was a school-teacher. Still left college to pursue a career in music, and—after service in the Navy during World War I—moved to New York, where he worked with W.C. Handy, Paul Whiteman, and Artie Shaw. He also studied composition with two teach-ers who could not have been more unlike each other: the conservative Boston composer George Chadwick and the vi-sionary Edgard Varèse. In New York, Still played the oboe in theater orchestras and was attracted to the ideals of the Har-lem Renaissance, but in 1930 he moved to Los Angeles, which would be his home for the rest of his life. Still was a trailblaz-er in many ways. He was the first African American to con-duct a major orchestra (the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 1936) and the first to have an opera pro-duced by a major opera company (Troubled Island, by the New York City Opera in 1949). His catalog of works includes nine operas, five symphonies, numerous other orchestral works, and music for chamber ensembles and for voice.

Still composed Seven Traceries in 1940 for his wife, the pi-anist Verna Arvey. Seven Traceries is a suite of short move-ments, often subdued in character and sometimes quite daring harmonically—at moments this music is evocative of Debussy or Liszt’s late piano pieces. The tempos here are usually slow, the mood reflective and quiet—at only a few moments does the pace quicken, yet even the fast music feels restrained and expressive.

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Century Rag

ROLAND HANNA(1932–2002)

Roland Hanna studied piano as a boy, intending to make his career as a classical musician, but he soon developed a passion for jazz that changed the course of his life. After two years in the Army, Hanna completed his studies at Eastman and Juilliard and went on to a long career as performer and composer. He toured with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orches-tra, and across the course of his career he appeared as a jazz pianist throughout the world. In 1970 Hanna was knighted by William Tubman, president of Liberia, for his support of education in that country, and thereafter he was known as Sir Roland Hanna. He composed over 400 works, mostly for piano and jazz ensembles, but he also composed in classical forms for orchestra and chamber ensembles.

The slinky and poised Century Rag was first released in 1987 as part of Hanna’s solo album Round Midnight.

Fading Star

WILLIE “THE LION” SMITH(1893–1973)

The very colorful Willie Smith was the son of an organist, and she taught him to play the piano when he was six. Af-ter a tough youth (it included helping his stepfather deliv-er pigs to a slaughterhouse, brawling with other students at school, and a brush with the law), Smith went to Europe in World War I as a member of the 350th Regiment, the Buffalo Soldiers, and there he was decorated for bravery, earning the nickname “The Lion” in the process. After the war, Smith re-turned to the United States and developed a career as a solo pianist. He is remembered as one of the originators of stride piano: the term “stride” refers to the wide leaps required from the pianist’s left hand (thus, “stride”), while the right hand

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has the melody. Smith did not begin to record regularly until the 1930s, and almost every photograph of him as a performer reveals that he invariably smoked a cigar while he played the piano. As composer and performer, Smith was vastly influen-tial—Duke Ellington said of him: “Willie ‘The Lion’ was the greatest influence of all the great jazz piano players who have come along. He has a beat that stays in the mind.”

Smith’s Falling Star dates from 1937—the wide skips in the pianist’s left hand make this part of the stride piano tradi-tion. Smith recorded Falling Star during the 1930s, and those interested can track down that performance on YouTube.

Keep Off the Grass

JAMES P. JOHNSON(1894–1955)

Called “the father of stride piano,” James P. Johnson is re-garded as a bridge between ragtime (he made an early record-ing of Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag) and modern jazz piano. Johnson grew up in the environs of New York City and studied piano as a boy. He began composing early—one of his most famous works, Charleston, was composed in 1923, when he was only 29. While they were still young men, Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith became closer friends, and the two of them toured together in the 1920s. Johnson was known as a sen-sitive accompanist to many singers, including Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters. Waters noted that: “All the licks you hear now originated with James P. Johnson—and I mean all the hot licks that ever came out of Fats Waller and the rest of the hot piano boys; they’re all faithful followers and protégées of that great man, Jimmy Johnson.” A musician of wide experience and taste, Johnson composed a number of works for orchestra that are only now being discovered and performed.

Keep off the Grass dates from 1944, just after Johnson had recovered from a disabling stroke. His own performance of this piece is sparkling—he had an unbelievably light right hand, and it dances nimbly throughout this brief piece.

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J-Walking

WYNTON GUESS(b. 1993)

Wynton Guess studied violin and piano as boy but gave up the violin to concentrate on the piano. His principal piano teacher as he grew up was Aygsegul Emine Durakoglu, and then Guess went on to complete his bachelor’s degree at the Boston Conservatory in 2014. Two years later he received his master’s degree in music from the Royal College of Music in London. Guess has performed with Wynton Marsalis, Chris-tian McBride, McCoy Tyner, and many others.

The composer has provided a brief introduction to J-Walk-ing, which he composed specifically for Aaron Diehl: “I have known Aaron since I was a child and I was always amazed at his abilities, especially being one of the only people I knew at the time that could play ragtime and stride piano like my hero Marcus ‘the J Master’ Roberts. The piece is based around this relationship we both shared to the stride piano greats like James P. Johnson and Jaki Byard.”

New World a-Comin’

EDWARD KENNEDY “DUKE” ELLINGTON(1899–1974)

In January 1943 Duke Ellington brought his band to Carnegie Hall for a series of concerts, and these visits continued until 1952. For the second series, in December 1943, Ellington composed a 14-minute piece for piano and jazz band (his band had about 18 players at this time), which he called New World a-Comin’. That title seemed to have a double meaning: it looked forward to the end of the war, but more importantly it looked forward to a bet-ter future for African Americans. Ellington later said “The ti-tle was suggested by Roi Otteley’s best-selling book of the same name. Otteley looked forward to better conditions for the Negro following World War II…A New World is A-Coming with the

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sweep and fury of the Resurrection…I visualized this new world as a place in the distant future, where there would be no war, no greed, no categorization, no non-believers, where love was un-conditional, and no pronoun was good enough for God.”

In New World a-Comin’, Ellington was looking beyond present strife to a better day, and the music has a mellow, lyr-ic character that seems to give us a hint of that better world. The arrangement for solo piano intentionally gets at the big-band sound of Ellington’s original.

Juba Dance

NATHANIEL DETT(1882–1943)

A descendant of slaves who had fled to Canada, Nathaniel Dett was the first African American to receive a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin Conservatory. He became the mu-sic director at Hampton Institute in 1913 and remained there for nearly 20 years; during that time, he founded several dif-ferent choirs, including the Hampton Institute Choir. Dett made his reputation as a pianist and composer, but he is per-haps best remembered today for his many arrangements of African American folksongs and spirituals for chorus.

Juba Dance, which has become Dett’s most popular compo-sition, is the final movement of his 1913 piano suite titled In the Bottoms. Dett explained the meaning of that title: “In the Bottoms is a Suite of five numbers giving pictures of moods or scenes peculiar to Negro life in the river bottoms of the Southern sections of North America.” Originally brought to the United States by slaves from West Africa, a juba dance was built on syncopated rhythms and the sound of slapped drums and stomped feet. Dett’s Juba Dance rides along an endless flow of energy and high spirits; along the way, Dett requires some modest hand-crossing from the pianist, and after all its ener-gy Juba Dance comes to a nicely understated close.

Program Notes by Eric Bromberger

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All of us at San Francisco Performances extend our deep appreciation to our many patrons who have helped keep us going during the pandemic by donating to our Bridge to the Future Campaign. Your generous support has ensured that we will gather again and share many more transformative performances together for years to come. Thank you!

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