Audience Returns to Greensill’s O1C Tradition

A year ago jazz pianist Mike Greensill did not let pandemic conditions disrupt his traditional Labor Day weekend performance for Old First Concerts (O1C). He came to the altar of the Old First Presbyterian Church along with John Wiitala on bass. They were separated by more than the currently recommended distance; but neither of them wore a mask, probably because cues were given through facial expressions. Except for the video crew that captured the performance, the church itself was empty.

Yesterday Greensill returned to Old First. As readers may know by now, O1C is admitting a downsized audience. However, the program was still live-streamed; and that was the way I experienced it. Greensill was again accompanied only by a bassist, this time Ruth Davies.

As usual, there was a balance of Greensill originals and standards. Also as usual, Greensill introduced each piece with engaging (and sometimes extended) personal commentary. It would be fair to say that his remarks were as richly improvised as his keyboard work.

One of his most intimate introductions had to do with the performance of Miles Davis’ “Blue in Green.” He reflected affectionately on his first encounter with Davis’ Kind of Blue album. At the time he had been pretty much locked into jazz from the Thirties, and I would guess that he never took to bebop and many of the more aggressive styles that followed it. Davis had already released Birth of the Cool about two years before Kind of Blue, and Greensill confessed to being taken with the emergence of the cool jazz movement.

Indeed, there tended to be a wistful sense of the cool that permeated the generous number of styles that Greensill worked into his program with Davies. The rhetorical stance worked for them, even when they went all the way back to Fats Wallers’ “Honeysuckle Rose” and all the way forward to Greensill’s own take on the Latin style. The latter was the perfect example of Greensill playing with his titles. The piece was called “A Minor Latin Tune;” and the key was (of course) A minor.

For those (like myself) who chose streaming over physical presence, however, there was a major problem. The soundtrack was not properly synchronized with the video. O1C ran into this problem a year ago, during the early days of producing video streams. However, the technical work improved with experience; and those improvements were evident last month when O1C was one of the hosts for the fifth annual season of the San Francisco International Piano Festival.

Yesterday afternoon, however, marked some significant backsliding. Both instrumentalists were not shy in taking a physical approach to performing on their respective instruments. In Greensill’s case that entailed an impressive command of the full breadth of his keyboard. As a result, when one heard high-register punctuations while watching his hands busy on the low-register side, it was clear that there were “technical problems.” When keyboard work gets elaborate, many concert-goers will stare intently at the keyboard while wondering about the pianist “Just what is (s)he doing and how is (s)he doing it?” When poor video technique forces the eyes to deal with noise, rather than signal, the whole listening experience is irreparably damaged.