GXF-3071

Grant Green - Remembering

Released - 1980

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 29, 1961
Grant Green, guitar; Wilbur Ware, bass; Al Harewood, drums.

tk.5 I'll Remember April
tk.6 You And The Night And The Music
tk.9 All The Things You Are
tk.14 If Had You
tk.15 I Remember You
tk.18 Love Walked In

See Also: 8-21284-2

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
All the Things You Are	Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern	August 29 1961
If I Had You	Irving King	August 29 1961
Love Walked In	George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin	August 29 1961
Side Two
I'll Remember April	de Paul-Johnston-Raye	August 29 1961
You and the Night and the Music	Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz	August 29 1961
I Remember You	Johnny Mercer, Victor Schertzinger	August 29 1961

Liner Notes

For all its beauty and fresh sounding vitality, the music in this album ultimately proves a sobering listening experience. Sobering because it reminds us anew of the great, thrilling promise that was implicit in Grant Green's earliest work, a promise that for a number of reasons, most of them having little to do with music, failed to develop beyond the levels achieved in his first few years of performing and recording. As this group of performances reasserts, the early to middle 1960s, following the guitarist's move to New York City, can be seen as having comprised the most productive, consistently creative period of Green's two-decade career in jazz' major leagues.

A mature, seasoned veteran with more than 15 years' performing experience in both jazz and rhythm-and-blues groups, Green was nearly 30 when he made the move to the East Coast. Born June 6, 1931, in St. Louis, Mo., he had begun guitar studies while still in elementary school, and by age 13 had graduated to full professionalism. "The first thing I played was boogie woogie," he noted of these early experiences. "Then I had to do a lot of rock and roll. It's all the blues, anyhow. Everything comes in handy in music," he added pragmatically. "A musician should be able to play anything when the situation calls for it."

It was in late 1959 that Green, having moved to Chicago, had made his first recording — for the small Delmark label — a date under the leadership of tenor saxophonist Jimmy Forrest in whose combo Green had performed when both were St. Louis residents. Following this he worked for a brief time in mid-1960 with organist Sam Lazar with whose quartet he recorded an album for the Chess jazz subsidiary Argo Records. Then at summer's end it was off to New York City where, thanks to his experience and versatility, he found ready employment, most often with the small organ-led combos then in vogue, the best known of which was Jack McDuff's.

During this time alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson introduced the guitarist to Blue Note's Alfred Lion and before the year was out Green found himself under contract to the label. Green's first Blue Note recording session, a Donaldson-led quartet date that also included organist Baby Face Willette and drummer Ben Dixon, took place early in 1961, and was followed within a week by his own first session as a leader, with Willette and Dixon on board, and appearing on the organist's debut recording for the label. The next few months saw the guitarist participating in a dizzying succession of record dates, performing on sessions led by Jack McDuff (on which he was reunited with Jimmy Forrest) for Prestige Records; tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, a "live" recording made at Minton's Playhouse that resulted in two LPs; tenorist Hank Mobley, leading a quintet that included Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones; Green's second album as leader, with bassist Ben Tucker and drummer Dave Bailey, as well as Willette's second LP; a Horace Parlan quintet date; a second album with McDuff, again for Prestige; Green's third LP session, with Yusef Lateef, McDuff and Al Harewood and, finally, the present recording which, admitted excellence not-withstanding, is here released for the first time.

What is perhaps most interesting about the six performances, taped in late August of 1961, just about a year after his arrival on the New York scene, is their conventionalism — what they reveal about Green's easy mastery of mainstream modern jazz guitar as it had been practiced over the preceding decade or so. The most widely held view of Green was that fostered by the majority of recordings on which he had appeared; that he was fundamentally a swinging blues-based player, master of funk and like earthy musics.

Which, of course, he was; his effortless, creative command of these forms is documented on album after album from every stage of his recording career. But that's not all Green was or aspired to. As is so well attested by these (and other) performances, the guitarist was an eloquent, thoughtful, imaginatively resourceful player of standard ballads, his handling of which evidenced both melodic fertility and a thoroughgoing mastery of harmony.

Green was, in fact, a complete guitarist and had developed his approach to the instrument through conventional music studies. As for most electric guitarists, Charlie Christian had been his earliest inspiration — "You can't get around him," Green emphasized — and, through recordings, chief stylistic model as well. While Christian's singing, single-note approach was the fundamental source of Green's, it is instructive to note that of modern, post-Christian players of the instrument Green cited Jimmy Raney as a major influence on the shaping of his own mature style. Raney, it will be recalled, has been highly regarded for the uncommon lucidity and intelligence of his musical thought, the breadth of his knowledge of harmony and the elegant, thoughtful melodism of his approach to improvisation, all qualities Green sought to emulate in his own handling of the more sophisticated ballad form. Kenny Burrell, with a style that also fused elements of Christian and Raney, was another guitarist Green admired.

Few guitarists, Christian and Raney included, develop mastery of the instrument without reference to at least some earlier approaches; however, once this is achieved, the guitarist may look beyond the instrument for further inspiration. Green, for example, observed in the early 1960s, "I don't listen to guitar players much. I dig horn players. I was very much influenced by Charlie Parker — very much."

This set of well-chosen ballads combines all of these elements. Christian's crisp, swinging attack and impeccable time sense find contemporary echoes in Green's — "If I Had You" is a particularly good example which even on legato statements possess an incisive staccato quality. Also, like Parker, there is always an underlying blues tonality to the strong clearly focused command of melodic invention and its anchoring knowledge of harmony that characterize his approach to improvising. The influence of Raney and other modern guitarists is to be seen in the choice of material, its harmonic reordering and the emphasis on lucidity and intelligence in organizing solos. What these performances most clearly indicate, however, is how fully Green had become his own man, with a sound, attack and approach to improvisation uniquely his own as well as a maturity of conception that placed him among the foremost, fluently creative guitarists of the day.

Commenting on his first guitar-bass-drums trio recording [Green Street, Blue Note 4071], John S. Wilson described Green's approach to the instrument: "His notes are clean, deliberate and full-bodied, avoiding both the clangor of some post-Christian guitarists and the muddiness of recent soul-influenced guitar men. He plays with a strong, swinging quality on both ballads and up-tempo swingers. His ideas are fresh without stretching for effect. He is working time-worn and time-proved jazz territory in a manner that shows how lastingly useful the basic elements of jazz can be in firmly creative hands." The description can stand for these selections as well, taped only five months later.

For one thing, the group heard here was an exemplary version of the guitarist's favored instrumentation. "Guitar and organ go well together," he has said of the setting in which he was most frequently obliged to perform and record in the early 1960s. "But my favorite trio is guitar, bass and drums. You can really stretch out and nothing gets cluttered up." In stating this preference, Green might have been talking about this specific trio, for in nonpareil bassist Wilbur Ware and brisk, tasteful drummer Al Harewood he had found virtually the ideal playing partners. Thoughtful, sensitive, empathetic and, above all, venturesome musicians, Ware and Harewood were truly the guitarist's peers not only in their command of their respective instruments but on the conceptual level as well. As a result, this particular unit, despite its ad hoc nature, achieved phenomenal levels of ensemble integration and artistic success. Theirs was not simply the standard soloist-with-accompaniment format but, rather, represented a genuinely collective approach to improvisation among three perfectly matched, like-thinking and responsive musicians united in common cause.

These performances strike and maintain unusually high levels of interactive artistry, and in fact the most notable feature of the trio's work is the consistency of its rapport. It's hard to single out individual performances for special mention, although "Love Walked In" and "I'll Remember April" might serve to typify a number of the elements that make the trio's work so special. Taken at bright medium-up tempos, the pieces crackle with barely suppressed excitement right from the outset, as though Green and company couldn't wait to get started on their recasting of the songs' melodic-harmonic potentials.

Once past the theme statement, the guitarist usually builds his solos slowly, his opening chorus invariably fairly conservative in character, with each succeeding one building in greater melodic-rhythmic complexity, ever richer imaginative resourcefulness and mounting, spark-producing intensity. It's as though the very act of playing enlivens and sets free his imagination, triggering a cascading flow of invention. Green's second chorus on Love Walked In," for example, consists of a gracefully shaped, virtually seamless improvised line that runs uninterrupted for almost the entire length of the chorus. The final bars of this solo, leading directly to Ware's perfect one-chorus statement, make use of a device Green often favoured: that of repeating a phrase several times, with only slight variations, building an effective charge of tension he then defuses. On his unrelenting inventive "I'll Remember April" solo is to be found a fine example of call-and-response phrasing, another device he used in constructing his improvisations.

Following him on the piece, Ware contributes a buoyant solo that, possibly taking a page from Green's book, gets under way with a telling use of repetition and then strides into a dancing, surprise-filled set of inventions demonstrating both breathtaking technical mastery and unerring musical intelligence, and employing a number of the characteristic devices for which he was noted among his peers -double-stops, complex rhythmic displacements, rests and in general an uncommonly effective use of space.

Then too, there's Green's beautifully conceived solo on "You and the Night and the Music," variations organized three distinct ways: those conceived primarily as permutations of the song's melodic contour, those stemming directly from its harmonic armature and, third, those with a predominantly rhythmic basis, taking their impetus from the cadential character of the theme materials. While all three modes are present simultaneously in every improvisation, Green has so ordered his solo on this selection that we are able to discern his reliance on each as it assumes primacy in his mind, making for an instructive as well as immensely pleasurable listening experience. We literally can hear him think his way through the piece. But then, each of his, Ware's and Harewood's contributions —individually and collectively — to these six performances reveal to us men engaged by and responding to their art and its materials with fervent, spirited creativity, keen intelligence and utter rapport.

Although not released during their lifetimes, these selections add richly to the discographies of Green and Ware both of whom, it will be recalled, died in 1979. Considering the vastness of his talent, the bassist left behind a pitifully meagre body of recordings, which is swelled considerably by his work on this session, for his contributions were pivotally important to the artistic success this trio achieved in its short existence. Green, too, is well served by these performances, far better in fact than by most of the recordings he made during the last decade-and-a-half of his life when the exigencies of keeping a group working, no less than self-imposed, external and often conflicting pressures towards the production of music of a more commercially-oriented nature, resulted in a large number of insipid performances of unworthy material. Even more sadly for Green, the popular success he and his producers sought so determinedly failed to materialize, so the guitarist had trivialized his music for nothing. Fortunately for us, however, the true nature of his artistry has been well documented on his Blue Note recordings from the early to middle 1960s, to the best of which can now be added this splendid, recently discovered trio session. Like his finest work from this period, this music will endure.

Pete Welding