So comfortable was he in his role as an artist, he began to have a more elaborate dream. A lush ambition. A covert longing. "I don't know if I'll ever get around to it, but I would love to get with some violins," he said.

But he also began to look back at the things he had left behind. His family. His friends. These were situations that were a little less visionary, less formal. He missed the down-home feeling of St. Louis and her people. He especially missed the jam sessions where the brothers used to just let it all hang out.

"Musicians don't get together like they used to," Grant said. "That good feeling seems to be gone. We had it back home, and I understand it used to be that way in New York, too...guys would get together and jam, have fun. Look, a friend of mine has this great big loft, with a good piano and everything, and nobody wants to come by. If there are guys who want to, I don't where they are. The other day I asked some cats to come by, and they acted real suspicious, asking all kinds of questions. So I just froze and told them, "Later.' What it is, I don't know. Maybe there are too many musicians and not enough work, and people get jealous of each other. That might be it."

He was right. New York was a place where everyone wanted a piece of the action. Matthew Nelson, a guitarist, confirms what Grant felt at the time. He recalls walking down the street one day and noticing an unusual number of guitarists in one club. "I was on my way home and stopped by this bar to get myself a beer," Matthew says. "I noticed that it was kind of early, but it's packed. And I'm saying, 'What's going on? I live around the corner. I should know about this.' So I notice that there's a lot of guitar players in the place. And we didn't care for each other that much. A couple of them came up to me and said, 'I know you're not going to play because Grant Green's here tonight.' And oh, I was crazy about Grant, but I had never seen him play in person. I had a lot of his records, though. So I said, 'Where is he?' and they pointed him out. He was sitting at a table talking to a young lady. They kept egging me on, and one guy said, 'Well, I played.' So I said, 'Well, I guess I'll have to play.' So I walked over to the table and said, 'Mr. Green, my name is Matthew Nelson, and I play guitar and I'd like to use your amplifier.' Well, I guess he was annoyed, but he said, 'Go ahead. Everybody else is.' Fortunately, I had played with the organ player who was there. The organ player was very good. His name was C.C. Williams. So I went up on the stage and said, 'Hey, C.C.' and he says, 'Hey, man, come on up and play something.' So I went up and I started to play. And I was scared to death because Grant Green was in there. So Grant gets up from the table. And I think, 'I guess he's going to come up and yank the plug out.' But he didn't. He came up on the bandstand, he leaned over, and he whispered in my ear, 'I hear you playing that Kenny Burrell shit.' And he walked back and sat down at the table. I felt very good then, and I kind of opened up a bit. And anyway, to make a long story shorter, Grant came up on the bandstand and sat down. And he started to play, too. He hooked up to the amplifier, and we sort of played together for a minute. He kind of washed me away. But I still felt good, and when I went down, one of the people sitting at the bar said, 'He had to do that, man. You were putting a lot of pressure on him. He had to just come up and show you.'

"So after that set was over, Grant came down and we got to talking, I said to him, 'You know, I'd like to take some lessons or something from you.' And he kind of looked at me and smiled and he said, 'No, you've got to get it the same way I got it. But you're really on the right track.' He was going to be there two more nights, and he said to me, 'Anytime you want to play while I'm here, come on in and play.' Well, I had my chest out a million feet because I told the other cats, 'Hey, did he ask y'all to come in and play?' I went back the next night, but I didn't play. I wanted to sit back and listen. The band was getting ready to go on, but somebody had a lot of money in the jukebox. Most musicians would just turn the jukebox off so they could go ahead and play, but Grant didn't do that. He did something that, to me, was very phenomenal. He just sat up on the bandstand by himself and every record that came on that jukebox, he played with it. He sat there and played with the record like he was on it. The last night he was there, I came in and we talked for a moment and he said, 'Hey, man, just keep on doing it because you sound good. I think you'll make it.'"

Matthew, who was giving private lessons at the time of our interview, says he never made it big like Grant, but he has certainly proven himself on the instrument over the years. "See, I've been around a long time. If you play a phrase, I don't care who you are, I'll tell you where you got it from. I can hear all of the young cats coming up. My wife looks at me, and she gets amazed because I'll sit there listening to a young guitarist and she'll say, 'That guitarist can play.' And I'll say, "Yeah, he stole all that from Grant Green.' Or Wes, or whoever it was. I purposely for a long time wouldn't even play octaves because I didn't want people to say, 'Oh, you're imitating Wes.' I don't care what you play, try to play yourself. People might not like what you play, but if it's good, they'll come around to it. People didn't like Thelonious Monk. They used to say, 'What is he playing?' Well, today they are not saying that. And those are some of the things Grant had. He played how he felt. He reallyplayed how he felt, and that's why he was as great as he was because you couldn't pin him to somebody else."

Matthew went on to describe how he saw Grant Green years later with Kenny Burrell and two other guitarists in a concert at Carnegie Hall. "Everybody that I spoke to who saw that concert said the same thing. They said that

Grant Green kicked everybody's butt," says Matthew. "But people have to know that music isn't even about who plays the best. I remember Les Van telling me a story about he and Dizzy Gillespie working at the Newport Jazz Festival one year, and he said he was standing at the bar and some people came in and said, 'When are you going on?" And he said, "Well, we don't go on until tomorrow." I think Duke Ellington and somebody else was going to on that day. And they said to Les, "Well, we hope you win.' And that seems to be the American thing - competition. But it really isn't competition. There are artists that I love very much, but if I go to see someone else, I completely take those artists out of my mind because I just want to focus on who I came to listen to. I don't want to be looking at Grant Green and thinking about Wes Montgomery. I think I've heard some of the greatest jazz musicians that one could hear who never will be known and who, in some cases, could outplay all those people on those records you buy...We used to say, 'Now when you go to one of them little hick town, it's that guy in them big overalls that's gonna take your instrument from you and run you right out the door.'"