BLP 4086

Grant Green  Grantstand

Released - February 1962

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 1, 1961
Yusef Lateef, tenor sax, flute; Jack McDuff, organ; Grant Green, guitar; Al Harewood, drums.

tk.8 Blues In Maude's Flat
tk.11 My Funny Valentine
tk.12 Grantstand
tk.15 Old Folks

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Grantstand	Grant Green	01 August 1961
My Funny Valentine	Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers	01 August 1961
Side Two
Blues in Maude's Flat	Grant Green	01 August 1961
Old Folks	Dedette Lee Hill, Willard Robison	01 August 1961

Liner Notes

IN his third album for Blue Note, Grant Green has achieved a consistency of fully relaxed feeling that is rare in jazz recordings. There isn’t a track that doesn’t sound like an after-hours conversation between men who experience music in warmly similar ways. The basic quality that all four jazzmen on this date share is total lack of pretentiousness along with the ability to express their ideas and emotions with direct, economical clarity. These performances are neither flag-waving “soul” testimonies nor strained attempts at creating o “new wave.” They are in the vintage jazz vein of straightforward story-telling, and accordingly they ore refreshingly and durably enjoyable.

Green, now thirty, is originally from St. Louis where he was already a professional musician at the age of thirteen. His long apprenticeship was served in both jazz and rhythm and blues combos, but it took a decision to come to New York and the interest of Lou Donaldson to bring him to the attention of Blue Note and a chance to start building a reputation on record as an authoritative and easeful jazz guitarist. (His two previous albums are Grant’s First Stand, Blue Note 4064, and Green Street, Blue Note 4071.)

The opener, Grantstand, a Green original, has a characteristic declaratory theme which leads naturally to a lithe solo by the guitarist with pungent but never overbearing punctuations by organist McDuff. Green gets a remarkably full, singing sound from his instrument without the querulous, metallic overtones that mar the work of many other electrified guitarmen. In addition, moreover, to the lucidity of his conception, there is a deep, flowing pulsation that sets and sustain a firm but pliable rhythm curve.

Yusef Lateef is just the right hornman to join with Green. Also thirty, Lateef has worked and learned with a varied range of groups - Lucky Millinder, Lucky Thompson, Dizzy Gillespie, Lips Page, and Roy Eldridge, as well as his own provocative combos. His tone too is full and firm and he conveys, as does Green, an invigorating feeling of considerable latent power. He does not, in short, explode in all directions at once but rather constructs his solos judiciously and with supple shading to create the maximum effect. Also like Green, there is no hint of strain in Lateef’s work. He is always in full command.

The playing of Jack McDuff in this set seems to me to have mellowed considerably. Most electric organists cause me acute aural pain because they seem bereft of any sense of dynamics. McDuff, however, ploys with commendable restraint and taste; and while his solos are horn-like in phrasing, he does not neglect the voicings possible for him on the organ so that his work combines the depth of timbre of which an organ is capable and a leanness of melodic line. He is one of the very few jazz organists who does not sound on ballads as if he were playing a bridge between episodes of Young Widder Brown; and on up tempo numbers, he does not, praise be, resemble a riveter under water.

A word or more is in order here too for Al Harewood, a veteran modern jazz drummer who in recent years has been supplying the foundation for Lou Donaldson’s combo and for the Horace Parlan Playhouse Four with Booker Ervin. Harewood is a model of percussive discretion. He never obtrudes, but he's always dependably and intelligently there, feeding the soloists and keeping the pulse alive.

To my ear, My Funny Valentine is Grant Green’s most impressive ballad performance on record so far. He avoids both glucose sentimentality and the temptation to break the mood by double-timing. Green’s thoroughly uncluttered thematic improvisations appear deceptively simple but represent a post-graduate skill in spacing and selection of notes while keeping the rhythmic substructure from sagging, as often happens at this challenging a tempo.

Another Green original, Blues in Maude’s Flat, is based on a comfortable, groove-setting riff from which Yusef Lateef shapes an intriguing solo. He begins with on almost ominous deliberation and builds into a classically cohesive blues summation — close to a talking blues — that is one of the triumphs of this album. Lateef’s long exploration of the blues here is another example, as is Green’s work in Funny Valentine, of a man having enough imagination and emotional thrust to fully utilize that much space. The beginning of Jack McDuff’s solo is one of the most musical statements I’ve ever heard on an electric organ and gives me hope for he future of the instrument in jazz. Green too begins his solo ruminatively and continues with an easy-rolling, deep-toned assurance. This track in particular not only sounds like an early morning conversation but gives me the impression of overhearing the talk. In other words, there is no indication of all this having happened in a recording studio, and no better tribute can be given an a&r man.

The final track is o gentle, soft-spoken reanimation of Old Folks that continues the mood of mellow relaxation that suffuses the album as a whole. To this point, Grant Green’s reputation has been primarily as a blues-strong swinger — which he is — but this new collection also underlines Green’s other, lyrical assets. He is a mature musician who can express much more than aggression and above all, he is an uncommonly relaxed — and relaxing — improviser. Accordingly. Grantstand is a place to which a listener can return again and again, much like a familiar and warm neighborhood bar where no one is trying to con anyone and where the patrons are united in the pleasures of mutually understood self-expression.

—NAT HENTOFF

Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER
Jack McDuff performs by courtesy of Prestige Records.

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT GRANTSTAND

Back in the early 1960s, the jazz world seemed to be divided into those who savored and those who scorned the Hammond B-3 organ. Rarely did the twain meet; but once in a great while, a session would come along with a slightly different angle on the organ-band genre. Whether under the leadership of an organist or not, the resulting album would be declared an "organ record" for those who don't like organ records.

Long before Larry Young began pushing the envelope, Grantstand was the model of such recordings and the primary example of organ jazz for organphobes. This is doubly curious, because it features not only the classic instrumental complement for such dates (tenor sax, organ, guitar and drums) but is also built around a pairing of featured artist and keyboard accompanist that was part of a regular working unit. Chalk up the singular results to the talented foursome brought together for the occasion, and to the guiding hand of producer Alfred Lion.

While Grant Green's name was inextricably linked with Blue Note Records during the first half of the 1960s, the guitarist had actually spent much of his first year in New York in a band led by one of the most popular leaders on the rival Prestige label, organist Jack McDuff. Green participated in a couple of McDuff's Prestige sessions in the months before Grantstand was taped. Yet while those performances established the empathy between the pair that is displayed throughout this collection, they (like the rest of McDuff's output at the time) only hinted at the sensitive, almost pianistic grace that the organist employs here. The present well-designed environment clearly brought out the nuances in McDuff's music to a previously unprecedented extent. It did so by placing emphasis on material that could be interpreted outside the testifying organ norm, and by recruiting musicians to complete the quartet who ensured the freshness of the group sound.

Both Al Harewood and Yusef Lateef are essential to the success of Grantstand. Harewood did not operate that far from the soulful terrain of many organ bands in his work with Lou Donaldson, Horace Parlan and Stanley Turrentine during this period, but he never put as much fatback in his beat as Ben Dixon or Joe Dukes, two drummers heard regularly with McDuff and Green. Harewood's time is clean and quietly infectious, moving the music along without unnecessary muscle. Lateef is another highly passionate player and a pioneer in the incorporation of African and Asian elements in jazz. He was well known for the exoticism of his recordings as a leader, his pioneering use of oboe as well as tenor and flute, and his ethnomusicological leanings, but had not been heard as the featured horn in an organ combo. Like McDuff, Lateef was also not a Blue Note regular, though he would soon record again for the label on Art Blakey's The African Beat. The presence of both the drummer and the saxophonist ensured that Green's fifth session as a leader in less than a year (his third to see release) would deliver something different.

Deliver it did, with a mellow, conversational ambience that is the essence of what is often referred to as after-hours music. There is passion without shouting, and swing that moves with subtlety rather than sledgehammer force. The open, harmonically spare form of the title track immediately takes the music into a realm closer to the modal investigations of the era than to fashionable funk; the use of flute on "My Funny Valentine" provides effective contrast in a manner that recalls Jerome Richardson's participation in the Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis/Shirley Scott Cookbook sessions on Prestige; and the gentle propulsion of "Old Folks" cannot help but induce head shaking and finger popping. Best of all is "Blues In Maude's Flat," a fifteen-minute excursion that includes a Lateef tenor solo for the ages. (Speaking of age, original annotator Nat Hentoff got Lateef's wrong. The multi-instrumentalist was actually 41 at the time of this recording, and still sounds as virile and expressive over 40 years later.) A session with this instrumentation that contained only one blues was a true rarity, and the compact disc era has given us a second study in the twelve-bar form, "Green's Greenery," that was taped at the start of the session and omitted from the original release for reasons of time only.

Grantstand's many eloquent moments combine to create an album even greater than the sum of its parts, one that works well when sampled track by track but really deserves to be heard in its now-expanded entirety.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003