# A pianist swings hard in both classical and jazz: Photos, Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/03/12/a-pianist-swings-hard-in-both-classical-and-jazz-photos-video/
- Published: 2019-03-12T15:41:23+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**At the Juilliard School, the pianist Aaron Diehl studied both classical and jazz
traditions. And in the years since, he’s chosen to follow each of those paths — 
and sometimes both, simultaneously.**

Mr. Diehl has played with Cécile McLorin Salvant and Wynton Marsalis. His own recordings
as a bandleader have revealed him to be not only [a stylish improviser](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPYDo-d_1kw),
but also a [composer worth watching](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuGxVkf8AC0).

In recent years, he has revived the practice of interpreting Gershwin’s concert 
music through an improvisatory filter. His imaginative yet idiomatic turn in the
Concerto in F with the New York Philharmonic at their opening-night gala in 2016
contained the hardest-swinging note I’ve ever heard inside David Geffen Hall. (It
was an interpolated low D that Mr. Diehl tossed off with casually elegant force 
toward the end of the first movement.)

This weekend, Mr. Diehl plays “Rhapsody in Blue” (on Saturday) and the less familiar“
Second Rhapsody” (on Sunday) with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of the brief
but potent series “William Grant Still and the Harlem Renaissance.”

“The challenge is creating this balance between the improvisation and the written
score,” Mr. Diehl said of his approach to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Gershwin, in a way, is the exception this weekend: The rest of the Philharmonic’s
programming puts the spotlight on black composers. William Grant Still’s symphonies
serve as anchors of the programs, the First on Saturday and the Fourth on Sunday.

**Symphony No.4 ”Autochthonous” – William Grant Still.**

Symphonic arrangements of works by Duke Ellington also appear all weekend, and a
new piece — Adolphus Hailstork’s “Still Holding On” — will have its premiere on 
Sunday. (It’s one of the 50-plus commissions the orchestra has made as part of its
centennial season.)

An earlier orchestral miniature by Mr. Hailstork, “[Celebration](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOgw9c3tOaU),”
was captured in the 1970s for Columbia Records’s Black Composers Series, a set which
was recently remastered and reissued. That recording was the conductor Thomas Wilkins’s
introduction to Mr. Hailstork’s music.

Two symphonies by William Grant Still, one famous and one lesser known, will be 
played this weekend.CreditLibrary of Congress

![](https://i0.wp.com/static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/16/arts/16ORCHESTRA3/16ORCHESTRA3-
articleLarge.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

**Two symphonies by William Grant Still, one famous and one lesser known, will be
played this weekend.**

“I’ve always found him to be a great craftsman,” said Mr. Wilkins, who will be conducting
the Los Angeles concerts. “You hear his upbringing in his music; you hear his culture
in his music. But it’s not on the sleeve.”

“It’s quite tonal,” he added, “but it’s not without chromaticism. And some of the
time, because he’s sort of hinting at a blues lick or a jazz gesture, we find notes
that are bent or twisted. Or a jazz harmony all of a sudden.” (Two other pieces 
by Mr. Hailstork will be performed by the Harlem Chamber Players on Feb. 28 at the
New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.)

Mr. Wilkins said that he and the Philharmonic wanted to acknowledge Still’s earlier
and better-known First Symphony — subtitled “The Afro-American Symphony” — but also
push audiences toward less familiar parts of the composer’s body of work.

“He’s unapologetic about being a black person,” said Mr. Wilkins. “In the last movement
of the First Symphony, he begins with this plaintive song in the entire orchestra,
that eventually finds its way to the cello section only — which I think is the instrument
which sounds most like the human voice. There is this ‘Lord have mercy’ kind of 
sound in that music. And then, of course, the allegro takes over. It’s ‘we have 
no choice but to go forward.’ That’s what that music does.”

Adolphus Hailstork in 1989. His piece “Still Holding On” will have its premiere 
in Los Angeles on Sunday.CreditPaul A. Aiken/The Virginian-Pilot, via Associated
Press

![](https://i0.wp.com/static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/16/arts/16ORCHESTRA2/merlin_150386928_ba49636c-
4597-4b08-ba85-6571be693663-articleLarge.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

**Adolphus Hailstork in 1989. His piece “Still Holding On” will have its premiere
in Los Angeles on Sunday.**

In the Fourth Symphony, Mr. Wilkins identifies “that same longing, that same aspirational
sound world. But this symphony ends not allegro, but profoundly — it’s like a pronouncement
at the end. It’s grand, and the gestures are large and bold. And not lickety-split
fast. It is its own kind of affirmation: ‘Yes, this is who I am.’”

Asked what else they could imagine programming, were the Philharmonic’s short festival
to be longer, Mr. Wilkins named William Dawson’s “[Negro Folk Symphony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXDNHwFsmrE)”
and “more Hailstork.”

Mr. Diehl said he would be eager to tease out unexpected connections between different
centuries: “I would have Scarlatti on, maybe, the top half of the set. And then 
end with, like, Roscoe Mitchell. I just feel like good music is good music. Duke
Ellington always said that.”

![](https://i0.wp.com/static01.nyt.com/images/2019/02/16/arts/16ORCHESTRA1/16ORCHESTRA1-
articleLarge-v2.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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