BST 84310

Grant Green - Goin' West

Released - May 1969

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, November 30, 1962
Herbie Hancock, piano; Grant Green, guitar; Reggie Workman, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

tk.4 Wagon Wheels
tk.9 Thumbing Tumbleweeds
tk.6 Red River Valley
tk.13 On Top Of Old Smokey
tk.20 I Can't Stop Loving You

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
On Top of Old Smokey	Traditional	December 30 1962
I Can't Stop Loving You	Gibson	December 30 1962
Wagon Wheels	DeRose, Hill	December 30 1962
Side Two
Red River Valley	Traditional	December 30 1962
Tumbling Tumbleweeds	Nolan	December 30 1962

Liner Notes

On one level, the thematic unity of this characteristic essay in relaxation by Grant Green is The West. Five songs, associated with various manifestations of that once lost frontier, are transmuted by Grant Green and his colleagues into jazz ore. In the process, this becomes a model demonstration of how jazz is shaped and in turn of how jazz can shape the most familiar materials. In terms of beat, line and texture, this is the kind of quintessential jazz which could both serve as the first lesson in a course on the nature of the jazz language while also being an album which the instructor would keep playing from sheer, non-academic pleasure at home.

Consider "On Top of Old Smokey.” I have heard so many hearty versions of this by the very young and so many put-ons of it by adolescents — and even some serious invocations of it by folk acolytes — that I had no desire to hear the venerable song for at least another decade. Until, that is, I was lifted into kinetic as well as aural pleasure by Mr. Green and company. This climb turns out to be a richly swinging, crisply paced act of mountain magic that is, I submit, a particularly persuasive demonstration of the regenerative powers of jazz. Worth particular attention is the resourceful, precise and yet limber drumming of the superbly alert Billy Higgins. And because of the quality of engineering, the total design of Mr. Higgins’s inventions is clearly, palpably immediate throughout.

Grant Green’s tone — warm but strong, flowing but controlled — is fused into “I Can’t Stop Loving You” so that while the song remains pulsating with sentiment, it does not become awash with sentimentality. The performance also illuminates the ruminative lyricism of Herbie Hancock who also — as on every track - demonstrates the considerable art of unfailingly tasteful accompaniment. And as for Mr. Higgins, his brushwork is a joy to the more subtle of the senses.

These "Wagon Wheels" are driven by the currents of “soul" — deep currents that have coursed through blues and gospel streams until on dry land, they indeed change the wagon into a prairie schooner. And on this track, I would suggest you take special note of the attack of both Green and Hancock — their authoritative incisiveness fused with a beat of such probing pulsations to make even the Indians on route consider ecumenicizing their percussive rituals. Speaking of using this album as on agent of conversion to jazz, as I did in the beginning, I find it difficult to imagine that even a lunch meeting of Rotarians in that heartland of America once traversed by covered wagons could resist initiation into these special pleasures of traveling.

“Red River Valley,” in this easy-rolling version, also conjures up a far less parched version of the journey west than is customary. With long, lariat-like lines, Grant Green metamorphosizes the Song into a veritable oasis of spontaneity. Herbie Hancock’s solo is dance-like in its pointed gracefulness while Billy Higgins turns the trail into o groove. I expect this interpretation has permanently changed my expectation of this particular valley. From now on, whoever plays this song will have to measure up against the irrepressible life in this performance.

“Tumbling Tumbleweeds” is contemplative at the start, befitting those long, empty spaces, punctuated only by the tumbleweeds scattered by a cold wind. But inevitably, the temperature rises, and Grant Green lines out a deeper, more affirmatively assertive tole as the tumbleweeds move in more purposeful patterns, changing desolation into celebration. Here, as elsewhere in this buoyant journey, Reggie Workman also demonstrates the power of positive swinging.

In quintessential sum, what is happening here — against the backdrop of a Western set — is nothing less than undiluted jazz. Four thoroughly emphatic movers of the jazz spirit get to the core of the jazz experience, and the result is just plain joyful. Everything is together on this dote. The rhythmic sensibilities of the four are flawless in rapport, creating a kind of beat that transcends time, weather and geography, rooted as it is in the act of being. And the melodic variations are unconstrictedly organic, having in retrospect that tidal pull of inevitability which distinguishes self-conscious music-making from this quality of direct speaking through instruments.

As is evident, I expect, I find this session a waystop of delight the kind of album that will clear the head, quicken the blood, and put things in perspective. Wholly without pretentiousness, this is “Goin’ West” in a wider sense than stagecoaches and prairie schooners. It is the “West” that has always connoted possibility, open-endedness, carrying and filling one’s own bag. The Old West is now a network of gas stations, but the adventurousness that is jazz remains alive wherever you can find players who travel as lightly and as self-sufficiently as these casually intrepid four.

-NAT HENTOFF

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT GOIN’ WEST

Despite what some might think, jazz artistry and popular appeal are not mutually exclusive conditions. While many of the music’s greats in the years after World War II pursued their personal visions without concern or hope for commercial success at the level of pop musicians, others possessed musical personalities that, without compromise, spoke to a larger and less jazz-centered audience. One of the things that made the Blue Note label special was its ability to make both types of artists feel at home — Jackie McLean and Lou Donaldson, Sam Rivers and Stanley Turrentine, Herbie Nichols and Horace Silver, and the list could go on.

Guitarists are particularly inclined to what has come to be called crossover appeal, given the central place of the guitar in various forms of popular music; and Grant Green, with his lean melodic and infectious rhythmic gifts, not to mention the warm humanity of his tone, was a prime candidate for success beyond the typical Blue Note demographic. It is no surprise, then, that the label’s most frequently documented leader in the early ‘605 created several thematic albums that embraced related musical forms. Much of his studio time during 1962 was spent on such projects, which resulted in albums where the focus was on Latin standards (The Latin Bit), country/western music (the present Coin’ West) and gospel/spiritual themes (Feelin’ the Spirit), plus two tracks for an uncompleted bossa nova project with Ike Quebec that can be found on the CD reissue of The Latin Bit.

While Afro-Latin music and jazz were anything but strange bedfellows, and the funk/soul tastes of the period made the incorporation of sacred themes fairly common, the slant of the present collection might have been considered something of a stretch if not for the astounding success earlier in the year of Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. The breakthrough song from that album, “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” ¡s the only track here that would be considered truly “country,” with the rest of the program divided between folk tunes (“Smokey” and “Red River Valley”) and what might be called cowboy classics (“Wagon Wheels” and “Tumbleweeds”). Origins aside, Green approaches all of the material from what is clearly a jazz perspective. “Wagon Wheels” may be another of the guitarist’s many nods to Sonny Rollins, as the tenor saxophonist had included the tune on his own ode to the wide open spaces, Way Out West; while the almost totally reconfigured “Smokey” bows toward Louis Armstrong by borrowing the bridge from “Blueberry Hill.”

These choices, together with the low-key but canny arranging touches such as the testifying beat on “Wagon Wheels,” the quasi-bossa of “Red River Valley” and the after-hours momentum of “Tumbleweeds,” keep the music decidedly within the jazz realm, and inspired the kind of playing one would expect from the four imposing musicians who comprise Green’s quartet on this occasion. This was the first meeting of Green and Herbie Hancock in the Blue Note studios, and presaged such other notable collaborations between the two as Hancock’s own My Point of View and Lee Morgan’s Search for the New Land, as well as Green’s Feelin’ the Spirit. Hancock’s balance of the soulful and the experimental, like the modal genius of McCoy Tyner on other Green albums of the period, brings out aspects of the guitarist’s artistry that did not always surface on the many dates Green did with organists. The rhythm section of Hancock, Reggie Workman and Billy Higgins is also an inspired match of talents, and it is surprising that the aforementioned Lee Morgan disc is the only other session where they appear together.

Goin’ West is one of the prolific Green’s many projects that got set aside at the time of recording, only to surface years later. The wait in this case was not as long as some, as it was originally issued in 1969, and was quickly followed by Green’s return to Blue Note in more funk-oriented formats later that year. The uncredited cover makes it clear that the album was issued after Alfred Lion had sold the label to Liberty Records, which in turn had been purchased by Transamerica Corporation by the end of the ‘60s; but the production values, the music, and Rudy Van Gelder’s sound mark the date as a vintage effort. One suspects that the short playing time was primarily responsible for the album’s delayed appearance. Here is one more instance in which the quality of the playing more than makes up for any quantitative shortcomings.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003