Musical tribute to Keepnews
In 1966, Mike Greensill, the agile English-born pianist and arranger, was working for Her Majesty’s Customs Service in the seaside town of Dover — “my one straight job,” he says — when he got his hands on “Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington.” That classic 1955 album, with the Henri Rousseau jungle painting on the cover, was Monk’s first date for fledgling Riverside Records and its young producer, Orrin Keepnews, and it hastened Greensill’s transition from “moldy fig” traditionalist to Monk-loving modernist with a taste for good tunes.
Almost two decades later, Greensill was playing saloons in San Francisco when he met the man who’d made that and other sterling records by Monk, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans and others. He’d just finished playing the old Cy Coleman tune “It Amazes Me” at the Washington Square Bar & Grill when somebody tapped his shoulder and said in a warm growl, “I didn’t know anybody played that tune anymore.” Greensill looked up to find Keepnews, whose bearded mug he knew from photographs and whose work had enthralled him.
“I was starstruck. I had a drink at the bar with Orrin and his wife, Lucy, and we got on famously,” Greensill says.
He helped plan the Nov. 29 memorial tribute at Yoshi’s for Keepnews, a longtime Bay Area resident and cultural resource who died March 1, a day shy of his 92nd birthday. The pianist will perform in a quartet led by saxophonist Dave Ellis, whom Keepnews recorded here on his Landmark label, playing tunes spanning the producer’s work with Monk, Evans, Rollins and Cannonball Adderley ;in a duo with his wife, singer Wesla Whitfield, who made more albums with Keepnews than anybody else (a total of 16); and two Harry Warren songs with Whitfield and the Kronos Quartet, who made albums of Monk’s and Evans’ music for Landmark and were featured on Whitfield’s Keepnews-produced 2003 recording “September Songs.”
“Orrin had good taste and good judgment,” says Greensill, who plans to play a song from that first Monk Riverside record, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” “We trusted him when he said a take was good or not. We trusted his ears.”
Greensill was all ears when the voluble Keepnews launched into a story that could weave and rise like a good saxophone chorus.
“I loved to go out drinking with him,” the pianist says. “You asked one question and just shut up. He had marvelous stories to tell about people and the underbelly of the jazz world.”
Some of the best jazz players in the Bay Area, like saxophonist Noel Jewkes, will arrive onstage for the secondset jam session, and a few people will talk about Keepnews, among them his widow, Martha Egan (his first wife, Lucy, died in 1989), and sons Peter and David Keepnews, winging in from New York. Whitfield and Greensill may say a few words, too.
“I don’t think most people know about Orrin’s love for the American songbook,” Greensill says. “He was such a literate guy. He loved words, loved Rodgers and Hart, and he wrote great liner notes.”
For more information, go to www.yoshis.com.
Alloy at the Castro
Alloy Orchestra, the expert silent movie ensemble that began accompanying
Fritz Lang’s classic “Metropolis” in 1990 and sparked something of a revival, returns to the Castro Theatre on Dec. 5 for A Day of Silents, a show produced by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. The trio plays its score to “The Black Pirate,” a 1926 Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler, and “The Inhuman Woman,” a 1924 French fantasy by Marcel L’Herbier that includes a scene filmed at Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées featuring an unruly audience whose members included notable extras like Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie and James Joyce. For more information, go to www.silentfilm.org.
Strings for all
The Open String , a San Francisco nonprofit that provides violins, violas and cellos to underserved Bay Area students, has lined up an impressive cast for its Grand Concert fundraiser Dec. 8 at the restored Grand Theater on Mission Street, including the daring cellist Zoë Keating, San Francisco Symphony cellist Amos Yang and the Swiss violinist and composer Gilles Colliard. For more information, go to www.theopenstringfoundation.org.