One Day It Will

San Diego pianist and composer, Danny Green, has arranged a unique group of original songs, expanding his composition and arranging skills by adding a string quartet to his most recent production. The first tune, "Time Lapse to Fall," is rich with classical overtones. The next cut, "As the Parrot Flies" is lush with strings and uses a pizzicato technique on strings at the top of the song that plucks at the listener's attention. The piano sounds like a restless bird throughout and Julien Cantelm on drums makes his sticks move across his instrument like wings.

If you are a lover of Chamber Music, this album will satisfy that appetite, along with the creativity that jazz always brings to the table. The improvisational piano playing of Green steadily unfolds as he improvises. The string arrangements add depth to this recording. The string quartet features San Diego Symphony violinists Kate Hatmaker, Igor Pandurski and Travis Maril on viola, along with cellist Erica Erenyl.

Green is a native of San Diego from an academic family with both parents becoming educators. He earned his B.A. in Piano Performance from UC San Diego, where he studied jazz piano with Grammy-winning producer, Kamau Kenyatta and classical piano with John Mark Harris and Luciane Cardassi. His taste for music has evolved from grunge rock, to Ska music and Latin music influenced by The Buena Vista Social Club documentary that tickled his interest in Cuban music. Later he embraced the Brazilian music style and was finally drawn to jazz pianists like Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans. He attained his Master's Degree in Jazz Studies at San Diego State University, studying under the tutelage of Rick Helzer. Now Green is a bandleader with his own ideas about arranging, composing and recording. I found this musical project to be easy listening and quietly beautiful. But I never heard the fire and excitement that Evans, Hancock, Monk, Gene Harris, Billy Childs or Tommy Flanagan would bring to the bandstand. For my taste, I wish he had added one fast-moving, spontaneous, hard-swinging composition to this mix. He explained his project this way.