BLP 4111

Grant Green - The Latin Bit

Released - April 1963

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, April 26, 1962
John Acea, piano; Grant Green, guitar; Wendell Marshall, bass; Willie Bobo, drums; Carlos "Patato" Valdes, congas; Garvin Masseaux, chekere.

tk.2 Mambo Inn
tk.4 My Little Suede Shoes
tk.7 Brazil
tk.11 Besame Mucho
tk.15 Tico Tico
tk.16 Mama Inez

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Mambo Inn	Mario Bauzá, Edgar Sampson, Bobby Woodlen	26 April 1962
Bésame Mucho	Consuelo Velázquez	26 April 1962
Mama Inez	L. Wolfe Gilbert, Eliseo Grenet	26 April 1962
Side Two
Brazil	Ary Barroso	26 April 1962
Tico Tico	Zequinha de Abreu	26 April 1962
My Little Suede Shoes	Charlie Parker	26 April 1962

Liner Notes

ALTHOUGH Grant Green didn’t arrive in New York until the summer of 1960 and although he didn’t start recording for Blue Note until a few months later, his ascent to recognition was so swift that by 1962, he was an easy winner of the New Star guitar category in Down Beat’s International Critics Poll. Among the reasons for the quickness of Grant’s impact on other musicians and on critics is the refreshingly direct nature of his style. Technically assured, Grant avoids, however, bravura displays of digital expertise. With maximum economy of means, he drives into the core of whatever tune he’s enlivening, and unravels a series of uncommonly uncluttered variations. As Dan Morgenstern has summarized Green’s appeal, “His sound is full and singing, his conception clear and lucid.”

The details of Green’s odyssey into jazz are available in the notes to his four previous Blue Note sets (Grant’s First Stand, Blue Note BLP4064; Green Street, Blue Note BLP4071; Grantstand, Blue Note BLP4086; and Sunday Mornin’, Blue Note BLP4099). Briefly, he was born in St. Louis, June 6, 1931, and was a professional musician by the age of thirteen. Among St. Louis-based groups with which he worked were those led by Jimmy Forrest, Jack Murphy and Sam Lazar. Lou Donaldson heard Grant on one of his tours, recommended him to Alfred Lion of Blue Note, and accordingly, Grant’s recording career began.

Since arriving in New York in 1960, Grant has played frequently in Harlem at such rooms as Branker’s as well as occasionally on the road. One disappointment Grant has experienced since basing himself in New York is the scarcity of jam sessions. He is of the vintage tradition of jazzmen who like to ploy at any provocation; and although he is still searching for more after-hours opportunities to swing, Grant is able to bring the essence of free-wheeling playing for kicks to his public appearances and his recording dates. As hos been evident on his albums, Grant is devoid of the constricting self-consciousness which afflicts some jazzmen in a recording studio. In fact, wherever Grant Green is, a jam session—whatever else it’s called is underway. As Dan Morgenstern wrote after watching Grant in an uptown club, “What first strikes the listener about Grant Green’s playing is its remarkable relaxation. Sitting on the stand, eyes closed and legs crossed, Green seems utterly absorbed in his music, unfazed by the loud conversation and laughter at the bar.” Similarly, when he makes recordings, Grant plunges so fully into the music at hand that the result, as you will hear, is undiluted improvisation.

It is because of Grant’s remarkably consistent ease in many varieties of material, that this album of jazz with a Latin tinge becomes so seamless o blending of Latin idioms and blueslaced, modern mainstream swinging. The opening Mambo Inn, once popularized by George Shearing, has an engagingly unpretentious theme which Grant states simply before launching into a resilient, extended solo which emphasizes, to begin with, the unusually mellow, non-abrasive sound Grant gets from his guitar. There is, moreover, an unerring sense of structure so that Grant flowingly builds to continually fulfilling climaxes. Johnny Acea’s forceful playing is followed by Grant’s return with the kind of incisive solo which calls to mind his statement that “I don’t listen to guitar players much. I dig horn players.” And there is in his attack and conception a sinewy link to horn practices. It was Charlie Parker, incidentally, who was a particularly seminal influence on Green as was also, of course, Charlie Christian.

The more lyrical, reflective Besame Mucho receives here one of its most glowing, unhurried interpretations on record. Grant is one of those jazzmen who can play a melody almost straight and yet by means of his particular sound and thrust, he indelibly personalizes the line. After the theme has been unfolded, Green’s paraphrases are marked by another of his characteristics — a bracing definiteness of attack. There is no holding back of emotion or groping for identity in Grant’s work. Each solo announces itself as, "This is Grant Green, and this is how I feel right now.”

Worth focusing on here and in the other tracks ore the incisiveness and lucidity of Johnny Acea, a veteran jazzman who started in the late 1930’s as a trumpeter, switched to tenor and finally became established as a pianist with Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Dizzy Gillespie’s 1950 big band, Dinah Washington, Cootie Williams, Illinois Jacquet, and in recent years, often as o free-lancer.

The familiarly buoyant Mama Inez emphasizes Grant’s capacity for communicating irresistible high spirits. There is a great amount of joyfulness in Grant’s playing, a degree and depth of pleasure in the very act of making music that puts him in the tradition of the ebullient improvisers of the swing era. Grant considers himself, as his elders regarded themselves, an all-around musician. A musician,” he points out, “should be able to play anything when the situation calls for it.” And with this pride in professionalism, there is in Grant’s approach to jazz a pervasive delight in continually challenging oneself to animate each tune as fully and forcefully as possible. In this case, when a song calls for sensuous playfulness, Grant plunges into that groove with customary zest.

Brazil is infused by Grant with the same kind of uncomplicated ardor. Adding to the heat on this track and throughout the album is an especially well-integrated rhythm section. Along with the firmly pulsating bass of Wendell Marshall, Willie Bobo’s crisp drumming and the penetrating conga accents of Potato Valdez, there is the additional flavor of Garvin Masseaux’s chekere, an African shaker (listen to its particular stimulus behind Grant during My Little Suede Shoes).

One major mark of a confident jazzman is his ability to transmute the most previously innocuous of tunes into a spirited illustration of the essence of what used to be called “hot” playing. An especially apt — and danceable example — is the way Tico Tico is enlivened here. Begun with what one British reviewer has called Grant’s “deceptive simplicity,” the tune is gradually elasticized, intensified, and finally lifted out of its usual interpretative framework into o powerful but sunny essay in distilled swinging. Grant’s solo — with its supple rhythmic play — is one of his most infectiously easeful on record.

My Little Suede Shoes first became known to jazz partisans of the time through Charlie Parker’s version of it. Grant finds the appealing theme entirely opposite to his own forceful but more eupeptic temperament, and renews the song with relaxed gusto. If any one quality can be said to most completely identify Grant Green’s playing, it is warmth— a spontaneous, Seemingly, bottomless, enveloping warmth, which makes this "Latin bit” a journey into unalloyed pleasures of improvising over a steaming rhythm section.

— NAT HENTOFF

Cover Photo and Design by REID MILES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT THE LATIN BIT

When jazz musicians of the 21st Century look to the music of the Caribbean and Central and South America, they are generally seeking new paths to creativity. Things were different in the 1960s. Whether the source music was sublime, in the case of the bossa nova, or at the other extreme, the Tijuana Brasss, jazz musicians were usually more interested in the bottom line. Since the craze for Brazilian music inspired so many jazz albums that were inauthentic and/or uninspiring, it should be emphasized that this is not one of those exercises in riding the coattails of a commercial success. Jazz Samba, the Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd album that brought bossa nova to America's attention, was issued the same month that The Latin Bit was recorded, while the hit single "Desafinado" did not appear until two months later. Grant Green was not trying to ride the samba wave here; he was simply offering one more example in the initial phase of his recording career of his strengths and as a jazz guitarist.

Green's true for this session was one of his primary influences (and one Stan Getz's, too, for that matter), Charlie Parker. In a pair of "South of the Border" sessions in 1951 and '52, Parker had augmented his regular rhythm section with two percussionists from Machito's Afro-Cubans. Among the songs recorded was not only "My Little Suede Shoes," which proved to be one of Parker's most commercially successful recordings, but also "Tico Tico" (which he had played as a feature with Andy Kirk during the song's initial wave of popularity in 1944) and "Mama Inez." As Parker had a decade earlier, Green addressed these pieces with an unreconstructed jazz beat and harmonic sense, allowing his conception to transform the material rather than the other way around. As guitarists go, Green was not a technical wizard, and his rare deviation from single-string playing during "Mama Inez" sounds rudimentary compared to Wes Montgomery; but his fat sound, aggressive attack, and knack for balancing effortless flow with blunt repetition was rarely showcased to better effect.

When it came to rhythmic support, Green had a decided advantage over Parker, whose accompanists had to learn to accommodate each other on the fly. The pairing of Willie Bobo's traps and Patato Valdes's congas here is sublime, and had been nurtured by their ongoing work in Herbie Mann's band at the time of this recording. Garvin Masseaux, the miscellaneous percussionist who briefly became a ubiquitous presence on Blue Note dates, fits right in, his chekere functioning like a ride cymbal at many points. While "Mama Inez" contains a strolling chorus at the start of Green's solo that puts the drummers in a particularly vivid spotlight, they are magnificent throughout, as are former Duke Ellington bassist Wendell Marshall and journeyman pianist Johnny Acea, whose block chords reveal an understanding of the source music well beyond the rudimentary.

As was the case when The Latin Bit first appeared on CD, there are three bonus tracks here. "Blues for Juanita" comes from the same session, with Valdes and Masseaux omitted. The playing remains at the same high level, and the absence of other percussion reminds us that Bobo was a great jazz drummer as well as being a Latin music master, but the mood is decidedly different from that of the other material. Reasons of LP length and programmatic coherence combined to leave this performance unreleased for 35 years.

"Grenada" and "Hey There" were recorded four months later, the only products of an abbreviated session that originally appeared in a 1990 Green/Clark Mosaic box.

Bob Blumenthal, 2007