By Connor Beach
The annual Huntington Summer Arts Festival may be winding down, but there is still time to catch the music and performances at the Chapin Rainbow Stage in Heckscher Park.
The Summer Arts Festival kicked off on June 26, and the live music continues each night, Tuesday-Saturday at 8 p.m. through Aug. 12. The free shows are presented by the Huntington Arts Council and produced by the Town of Huntington.
The performers include local, nationally and internationally recognized musical talents and virtuosos. Acclaimed pianist and composer Danny Green certainly fits the bill.
Green, bassist Justin Grinnell and drummer Julian Cantelm, who make up the Danny Green Trio, will take the stage at 8 p.m., Aug. 3 in Heckscher Park to support the group’s newest album One Day It Will.
Green, of San Diego, began taking traditional piano lesions at five-years-old, but he tired of playing classical music around the age of 12.
“At that time I was really into Nirvana, and so I started learning all of their music by ear,” Green said. “That’s when the passion really started to kick in, when I started playing the music that I like listening to.”
Green formed the trio with Cantelm and Grinnell, both of whom he met in the local San Diego music scene, in 2010, and over the years the trio has recorded a number of albums and performed in venues around the country.
“We turned the trio into a lot more of a performing group rather than just a local working band,” Green said.
One Day It Will highlights the next step in the progression of the Danny Green Trio and Green’s composing chops. The album features the jazz trio backed by a full string quartet.
Green said the idea of working with string instruments was devised in 2016 during the recording of the album Altered Narratives.
“I fell in love with the sound, and continued writing so that we’d have more pieces to play when we perform live,” Green said. “At a certain point I had enough material for a full album, which became One Day At Will.”
Green said the challenge was to “make the strings really pertinent to the music and not just an afterthought,” and the composing the new album became a “fun period of self-discovery.”
The Danny Green Trio will be joined on the Chapin Rainbow Stage by a strings group from Wheatley Heights-based USDAN camp for the arts.
Green said that, although it doesn’t have the pull of traditional pop music, the success of events like the Huntington Summer Arts Festival shows that Jazz will always have a place in the American music scene.
“The music is constantly evolving, and the people who are into it absolutely love it,” Green said. “Jazz will always be more of a niche, but I think it will continue to thrive.”
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