Aaron Diehl’s Delightfully Jazzy SFP Debut

Pianist Aaron Diehl (from the SFP event page for this performance)

Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances (SFP) presented the last of three consecutive solo piano recitals as part of the current Summer Music Sessions 2021 programming. The pianist was Aaron Diehl, making his SFP debut. However, readers that also follow the San Francisco Symphony may have seen him at the beginning of this month in Davies Symphony Hall, where he joined conductor Edwin Outwater in launching the summer season.

Diehl was soloist in what I called a “historically informed” performance of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The “history” had to do with the fact that Gershwin had not yet written out the piano part when this piece was first performed. Most likely there was a fair amount of improvising on that occasion, and Diehl displayed an engaging approach to interjecting his own improvisations without compromising what was now printed in the piano part.

Last night Diehl prepared a program that explored a generous diversity of jazz piano styles that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century. He also provided a more “classical overture” in the form of a seven-movement suite composed by William Grant Still in 1940 entitled Seven Traceries. Diehl was clearly as much at home with Still’s transparent textures as he would be in the rest of his program’s tour of past jazz masters. Those iconic figures were, in order of appearance, Roland Hanna, Willie “The Lion” Smith, James P. Johnson, and Duke Ellington. The Johnson offering was coupled with the one contemporary composition, “J-Walking” by Wynton Guess. (The title was a play on the Johnson selection, “Keep Off the Grass.”) The program concluded with Nathaniel Dett’s “Juba Dance.”

Diehl was consistently at home with the diversity of jazz styles he had selected. Most impressive was Ellington’s “New World A-Comin’,” which was first performed in Carnegie Hall in 1943. Ellington conceived this piece as a piano solo, and that it the way he incorporated it into the first of the Sacred Concerts he prepared for performance on December 26, 1965. The music is practically a concerto for solo instrument, and Diehl’s account was as absorbing as the interpretation he had given to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

At the end of his program, Diehl continued his tour of “iconic figures” by selecting Scott Joplin for his encore, playing “Solace.”