Another Labor Day with Mike Greensill at O1C

Yesterday afternoon jazz pianist Mike Greensill once again presented his annual Old First Concerts (O1C) program at the Old First Presbyterian Church to celebrate Labor Day with his trio, whose other members remain Ruth Davies on bass and Brad Buethe on guitar. During the second half of the program, they were joined by featured guest vocalist Gail Terminello. As usual, this was a program which was, for the most part, a balance of familiar standards and Greensill originals.

Mike Greensill, Gail Terminello, Ruth Davies, and Brad Buethe performing the Old First Concerts annual Labor Day offering (screen shot from the video of the program being discussed)

Once again, the streamed version had some problems with mixing the levels of the individual microphones for both Terminello and Greensill’s introductions. However, for the most part, the clarity was an improvement over last year. This was beneficial since Greensill’s gift for commentary is usually right up there with his keyboard skills.

This year the vocal selections tended to be the most familiar offerings. Greensill biased his solo work with his own compositions, and I have to say that I come away from each one of them feeling I have experienced the music for the first time. Given the number of years I have been listening to Greensill, either his pieces are not particularly memorable or his personal catalogue is far larger than I expected.

Somewhat surprising was that he had only recently learned about contrafact, the idea of creating a new tune based on an old (usually familiar) one. This is a technique that tends to be best associated with Charlie Parker, whose “Koko” is a contrafact based on the chord progressions of Ray Noble’s “Cherokee.” Greensill demonstrated the technique by beginning with Victor Schertzinger’s “Tangerine” and then following up on it with his own contrafact.

It would be a bit churlish to dwell on any difficulties Terminello had with pitch, particularly when she could deftly dodge those problems with the innovative phrasing of her deliveries.