PHANTOM SWAY

    • Jazz for Nonbelievers: Grant Green’s Guitar

    Sorry for the lateness of this weeks playlist. Our subject this time is another guitarist named Grant Green.

    I have to admit that I really wasn’t aware of Green until we started looking for music ideas for our film Minty, a short reimagining of Harriet Tubman in an action-adventure context. (BTW, please donate to help us with post production costs!) The old spiritual Go Down Moses figures into the film because Tubman was known as the Moses of her people, and it turns out Grant Green did a couple of jazz versions of the tune.

    Here’s some of what Bluenote.com has to say about Grant Green.

    Grant Green was born in St. Louis on June 6, 1931, learned his instrument in grade school from his guitar-playing father and was playing professionally by the age of thirteen with a gospel group. He worked gigs in his home town and in East St. Louis, IL, until he moved to New York in 1960 at the suggestion of Lou Donaldson. Green told Dan Morgenstern in a Down Beat interview: “The first thing I learned to play was boogie-woogie. Then I had to do a lot of rock & roll. It’s all blues, anyhow.”

    His extensive foundation in R&B combined with a mastery of bebop and simplicity that put expressiveness ahead of technical expertise. Green was a superb blues interpreter, and his later material was predominantly blues and R&B, though he was also a wondrous ballad and standards soloist. He was a particular admirer of Charlie Parker, and his phrasing often reflected it. Green played in the ’50s with Jimmy Forrest, Harry Edison, and Lou Donaldson.

    He also collaborated with many organists, among them Brother Jack McDuff, Sam Lazar, Baby Face Willette, Gloria Coleman, Big John Patton, and Larry Young. During the early ’60s, both his fluid, tasteful playing in organ/guitar/drum combos and his other dates for Blue Note established Green as a star, though he seldom got the critical respect given other players. He was off the scene for a bit in the mid-’60s, but came back strong in the late ’60s and ’70s. Green played with Stanley Turrentine, Dave Bailey, Yusef Lateef, Joe Henderson, Hank Mobley, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and Elvin Jones.

    Sadly, drug problems interrupted his career in the ’60s, and undoubtedly contributed to the illness he suffered in the late ’70s. Green was hospitalized in 1978 and died a year later. Despite some rather uneven LPs near the end of his career, the great body of his work represents marvelous soul-jazz, bebop, and blues.

    “It’s all blues, anyhow,” is a pretty profound statement on many levels. Here’s a video of the Grant Green Trio playing live on French TV.

    And of course, here’s this week’s playlist. Feel free to jump back to the Wes Montgomery playlist and compare these two influential guitarists.

    Jim Jamitis
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