It is said that we can’t control what happens to us, we can only control what we do with it. In the case of pianist and singer Kelly Green, she has embodied the lighthearted name that her parents gave her whole heartedly.
She says, "My dad said since he was in high school, he always wanted to have a Kelly Green. So he said, 'Girl or boy, it's gonna be Kelly.' So I'm glad I'm a girl."
Green has embraced the name. She wears green. Her new album is called Eat Your Greens. She even had a green dress designed especially for the project, combining what she calls "old school meets new."
Green grew up in Orlando, Florida, and spent a lot of time at Disney World with her mother. She remembers the live musicians, the singers, the costumes, and especially one particular character.
"Tinker Bell flies in,” she remembers. “I loved the green outfit. I always really resonated with Tinker Bell just 'cause she's like a little magic fairy, and she's small and magical.
Green grew up in a house where jazz was already part of the family vocabulary. Her father is a bass player. She remembers singing along with the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman record with her mother.
And by the time she was in high school, she was serious enough about the music to find herself standing beside a piano at the University of Central Florida, watching Mulgrew Miller play "I Love You" solo.
She tells me, "I stood at the edge of the piano while Mulgrew played solo 'I Love You,' and it was insane. I was like, 'What is this?'"
Years later, Miller helped bring Green north to study at William Paterson, where she also encountered another great pianist and teacher, Harold Mabern.
She recalls, "I was really nervous in my first lesson, and he said, 'Don't be nervous. I'm just an old student.' And I was like, 'Whoa, there's so much to unpack in that statement.'"
That idea, that even the masters remain students, is all over Green's new album.Because "eat your greens" is also an instruction: to do the things that are good for you. For Green, that means learning the language.
"We're all still studying Charlie Parker, the study will never end, and Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk and, you know, Tadd Dameron. So everything came from somewhere else. So we're always, even if we don't mean to, we're always paying homage to, if we're playing jazz at all," she explains.
Eat Your Greens makes that lineage audible. There are standards by Duke Ellington, Ray Noble and Jerome Kern; a piece by Mulgrew Miller; and Green's own compositions, including a title track built on the chord changes to "Cherokee."
There's another kind of duality in Kelly Green's music. She sings. And she plays piano. "I am equally pianist and vocalist. I don't like to choose one or the other," she says.
"I really enjoy making albums like I make a set. And when I make a set, I have instrumental tunes and I have vocal tunes, and I like to have either equal amount, maybe one or two extra with voice."
So Eat Your Greens feels less like a collection of songs than a night with Green's band, which really is a band. Drummer Evan Hyde has been playing with her for a decade. Bassist Luca Soul Rosenfeld, who is also Green's husband, came later. Flutist Elijah J. Thomas completes the working quartet.
The lessons Green learned from her mentors went beyond the piano. Years after Mulgrew Miller's death, she was stitching together her wedding dress during the pandemic when she came across an interview with him.
In it, Miller mentioned the spiritual teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda.
"I stopped stitching. I said, 'Pause. What did he just say?' So we look up Paramahansa Yogananda," Green remembers.
Once again, Green found herself learning from the masters, but in a new way. She and her husband read Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi together and began studying his teachings. She says the experience changed the way she thinks about her life and her work.
Especially the idea of non-attachment: doing everything you can without becoming consumed by what happens next.
"We still need to do things, but we just need to let go of the attachment to the outcome. So we do everything that we can, because ultimately most things are not in our control," she tells me
We can’t decide what happens to us. And that's a particularly interesting philosophy for a musician preparing to release a new album.
She says, "It's scary to release it into the world and not know what people are gonna think about it and not know how you're gonna be received. So I think you have to let go at a certain point. Okay, I don't have control of this, but I have faith that... it's gonna work out, and whatever is meant for me is gonna come... and whatever is not isn't."
On September 30, Green will bring her working quartet to The Pocket in Midtown, joined by Scott Robinson, Wallace Roney Jr. and Steve Wilson, to celebrate Eat Your Greens.
A record built on years of study, practice, friendship and the lessons of the musicians who came before her. Now it's out in the world. What happens next is anybody's guess.
Watch my full conversation with Kelly Green HERE
