Benny Green at The Side Door in Old Lyme
Benny Green at The Side Door in Old Lyme on Saturday, August 29, for an intimate evening of solo piano.
There will be no rhythm section behind him. No bassist carrying the bottom end. No drummer keeping time.
Just Green, a piano and more than four decades of experience stretching from Betty Carter and Art Blakey to Freddie Hubbard, Ray Brown and Oscar Peterson.
Doors open at 7:15 p.m., with the performance running from 8 to 10 p.m. The all-ages concert is the second of two consecutive nights Green will perform at The Side Door.
From His Father’s Records to the Piano
Green was born in New York in 1963 and raised in Berkeley, California, where music was already waiting for him at home.
His father played tenor saxophone, and records by musicians including Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker became part of Green’s early musical education.
He began classical piano lessons at seven, but something else was happening when he sat at the instrument. Green was listening to jazz records and trying to reproduce what he heard, figuring out melodies and improvisations by ear.
Eventually, jazz won.
While still a teenager, Green was already working professionally around the Bay Area. He performed with singer Fay Carroll and gained experience alongside established musicians including trumpeter Eddie Henderson and bassist Chuck Israels.
Before Green was old enough to build a national reputation, he was learning how to listen, accompany another musician and swing.
Those lessons would become useful very quickly.
Betty Carter’s Classroom
After moving to New York, Green joined legendary jazz vocalist Betty Carter in 1983.
Carter’s bands had a reputation for becoming classrooms for exceptional young musicians. She demanded that players listen, respond and develop their own musical identities rather than simply reproduce what they’d heard before.
Green stayed for four years.
Then, in 1987, he stepped into another of jazz’s great training grounds.
Art Blakey called.
Becoming a Jazz Messenger
Joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers carried a significance far beyond landing another job.
For decades, Blakey’s band served as a launching pad for generations of major jazz musicians. Alumni included Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis, among many others.
Green had grown up listening to Blakey.
Now he was sitting at the piano in his band.
Green remained a Jazz Messenger until Blakey’s death in 1990, absorbing the hard-driving rhythmic approach that would become an important part of his own playing.
His next stop didn’t exactly lower the stakes.
Green went on to work with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, one of the defining jazz musicians of the postwar era.
Ray Brown and an Extraordinary Phone Call
Green eventually joined another master, bassist Ray Brown.
Brown’s career reached all the way back to playing with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker during the birth of bebop. He had also spent years performing with Oscar Peterson.
Green joined Brown’s trio in the early 1990s and remained with the group for several years.
Then Oscar Peterson himself took notice.
In 1993, Green became the first recipient of the City of Toronto’s Glenn Gould International Protégé Prize in Music.
Peterson personally selected him.
For a young jazz pianist, it’s difficult to imagine a more intimidating endorsement. One of the greatest pianists in the history of the music had effectively pointed across generations and said: watch this one.
The relationship didn’t end with an award.
Oscar and Benny
Green and Peterson eventually performed together and later recorded together.
Their collaboration produced Oscar and Benny, recorded with Ray Brown and drummer Gregory Hutchinson.
The album eventually leaves the rest of the musicians behind for its closing performance.
Two pianos.
Oscar Peterson at one.
Benny Green at the other.
For Green, it was another direct connection in an extraordinary musical lineage. The musicians he’d once encountered through records weren’t simply influences anymore.
They had become his teachers, employers, collaborators and peers.
Building a Career of His Own
Green eventually stepped out from those legendary bands and established himself as a leader.
His recording career has included albums for Blue Note and other major jazz labels, with more than 100 recording sessions as a leader and sideman.
His Blue Note years produced albums including Lineage, Greens, Testifyin! Live at the Village Vanguard, That’s Right!, The Place to Be, Kaleidoscope and These Are Soulful Days.
Along the way, Green has worked with another generation of major jazz musicians, including bassist Christian McBride and guitarist Russell Malone.
The thread running through it all is swing.
Green can be technically dazzling, but technique isn’t the destination. His playing comes from a jazz tradition in which rhythm matters just as much as harmony, and where even a complicated improvisation still needs to move.
Now Take Everyone Else Away
That’s what makes Saturday’s performance particularly interesting.
Green is playing alone.
A trio normally divides responsibilities among musicians. A bassist can establish the foundation while a drummer controls pulse and dynamics. The pianist can leave space, respond to the others or step forward and then retreat.
Solo piano removes that safety net.
Green has to provide the bass movement, harmony, melody, rhythm and improvisation himself. He decides when the music breathes and when it drives forward.
For a musician whose education came from some of jazz’s greatest bandleaders and rhythm sections, the format exposes everything he’s learned.
One instrument has to contain the whole band.
New Music Is Coming
The Old Lyme performances also arrive at an interesting point in Green’s recording career.
His new album, Renovation!, is scheduled for release on September 18, less than a month after his two nights at The Side Door.
The timing puts the Connecticut appearances immediately ahead of the next chapter in a recording career that has stretched across decades.
Green performs at The Side Door on both Friday, August 28, and Saturday, August 29, before heading to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for another performance the following night.
Saturday’s Old Lyme concert is the second of the two Side Door performances.
A Room Made for This Kind of Night
The Side Door Jazz Club is tucked inside the historic Old Lyme Inn at 85 Lyme Street.
Rather than a general entertainment venue that occasionally books jazz, The Side Door was created as a dedicated jazz listening room.
That distinction matters for a solo piano performance.
There are no arena screens or enormous distances separating musician and audience. The room is intimate enough to hear the smaller things: a change in touch, the space Green leaves between phrases, the left hand quietly establishing a pulse before the right hand takes off somewhere else.
Tickets are reserved seating, and the performance is open to all ages.
Free parking is available, and guests who dine at the Old Lyme Inn before the concert receive 10% off their dinner bill.
One Piano, Four Decades of Teachers
There’s a remarkable collection of names attached to Benny Green’s career.
Betty Carter.
Art Blakey.
Freddie Hubbard.
Ray Brown.
Oscar Peterson.
But Saturday night isn’t a history lecture.
Those musicians matter because traces of what Green learned from them remain in the way he plays.
The singer who taught him to accompany. The drummer who taught generations how to swing. The trumpeter whose hard-bop vocabulary helped define an era. The bassist who had been there when bebop was being invented. The pianist who personally chose Green as his protégé.
At The Side Door, none of them will be onstage.
In a way, all of them will.
Event Details
Event: Benny Green Solo Piano
Date: Saturday, August 29, 2026
Time: 8–10 p.m.
Doors: 7:15 p.m.
Location: The Side Door Jazz Club at the Old Lyme Inn
Address: 85 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, CT 06371
Seating: Reserved
Age: All ages
Parking: Free
Performer: Benny Green
Performance: Solo piano
Refunds: No refunds
Guests dining at the Old Lyme Inn before the performance receive 10% off their dinner bill.
More information is available at the Event Website link below.
To purchase tickets, click the Event Ticketing link below.
Featured image is an artistic representation inspired by the event and may not depict the actual people, location, or activities shown.
