Articles | Popular | Future

Grant Green: The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark – 1961-62

By Marc Davis

Imagine if someone discovered a stash of unreleased Beatles records 15 years after they broke up. Then imagine Apple Records released all that music in a 2-CD set. That's what Grant Green: The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark is like. I exaggerate, but not by much. Grant Green wasn't the Beatles of jazz. But for about five years in the early-to mid-1960s, he was arguably the best jazz guitarist around. He was in the same class ...

Grant Green: Matador

By Matt Marshall

Grant Green Matador Blue Note / Music Matters 2009 (1964)

This may be the reissue of 2009: a resplendent vinyl pressing of guitarist Grant Green's Matador on two 180-gram, 45-rpm records from Music Matters. This May 1964 recording was, like many Blue Note sets, not released until many years later (November 1979 in Japan in this case) and only reached the U.S. on CD in 1990. It has not been remastered since. The record ...

Grant Green: Street Of Dreams

By Chris May

Grant Green (1931-79) is probably the most sampled guitarist of his generation, and is rightly regarded as a godfather of acid jazz. His debut, Grant's First Stand (Blue Note, 1961)--heavy on the good foot groove--was made with soul jazz organist Baby Face Willette, and by 1965, when Green recorded an album for Verve, the label was able to title it, accurately enough, His Majesty King Funk. Many of Green's post-1970 recordings were built around extended, vamp or ostinato driven jams. ...

Grant Green: Idle Moments

By Chris May

> Grant Green Idle MomentsBlue Note1964 Guitarist Grant Green is most widely remembered today as a godfather of acid jazz, a consequence of the many groove-centric albums he recorded during his career. His debut, Grant's First Stand (Blue Note, 1961), was made with soul jazz organist Baby Face Willette and in 1965, when Green recorded an album for Verve, the label was able to title it His Majesty King Funk and ...

Grant Green: Live at Club Mozambique

By Norman Weinstein

This is some apotheosis of both jazz-funk and Grant Green, just when you thought Blue Note was practicing overexposure by adding yet another Green disk to last year's three discs worth of funky compilations. But this live session, which spent 35 years in the vault, transcends all previous Grant Green funk sessions by a mile. A lot of the credit has to go to the pluperfect chemistry of the band. Green may have been Blue Note's most ...

Grant Green: Live At Club Mozambique

By Chris May

A previously unreleased live session, Live At Club Mozambique captures Grant Green at the start of his final, groove-driven decade.

By this time, fame and dope had taken a heavy toll on the guitarist, who'd downsized to Detroit, where Club Mozambique hosted one of his regular gigs. Blue Note, now without Alfred Lion, pulled out several stops for this recording. Producer Francis Wolff flew in from New York, as did tenor saxophone soul star Houston Person and groove-centric drummer Idris ...

Grant Green: Sunday Mornin'

By Norman Weinstein

There are a lot of Grant Green records on the market these days, entirely too much for those of us who think of him as one of the more erratic talents in the distinguished Blue Note catalog. But Sunday Mornin', coming immediately after the recent release of three funk-themed Green compilations of questionable value, is a gem, arguably the finest album of his career. Green had the misfortune of being saddled by his record company with painfully stupid ...

Grant Green: Goin' West

By Colin Fleming

Tempting as it is to dismiss this Grant Green album as the sixties' slant on lite jazz, overriding talent, as one would expect, has a tendency to compensate for a decided lack of risk taking, the very virtue, considering the quality of these players, that could have elevated Goin' West to a minor classic. Recorded in November of 1962 and shelved until 1969, possibly because of its brevity or the glut of Green releases on the market, Goin' West , ...

Grant Green

By Larry Grogan

By Sharony Andrews Green Miller Freeman Books

To fans of the Blue Note label - and in the history of jazz there has never been a label with such a clearly defined ethos or sense of purpose - the name Grant Green is a very familiar one. Like label mate Bobby Hutcherson, Green was not only prolific as a leader, but also a ubiquitous session sideman as well. His name appears on scores of those dynamic Reid Miles ...

Grant Green: Carryin' On

By John Ballon

Having firmly established himself as the '60s jazz guitarist second only to the great Wes Montgomery, Grant Green was willing and able to move into something new and give himself up to the emerging funk wave that would seep across the '70s.

Attacked by purists as Grant's grand selling-out, these recordings have been rediscovered and widely sampled by legions of acid-jazz aficionados. Hypnotically rhythmic and quintessentially grooving, the five tracks on this straight reissue are all exceptionally tasty bursts of ...

Grant Green: Retrospective

By Scott Morrow

About five years ago, I heard guitarist Grant Green's "Ain't it Funky Now," a burnin' J.B. cover on Blue and Funky , a various artists Hammond organ compilation from Blue Note. I’d never heard anything like his honest, cutting tone – it rocked and funked like crazy. I hadn’t purchased much jazz, other than Miles and Coltrane, since I was in high school. And I’d always hated jazz guitar – guitars were supposed to be distorted! Now, 30-plus Green CDs ...

Grant Green: Retrospective 1961-1966

By C. Andrew Hovan

While the history books will more than likely survey the lineage of jazz guitar by focusing on such technically dazzling plectrists as Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and Kenny Burrell, a wider view with a focus on peripheral talents will likely support the fact that instrumental proficiency is but a mere part of the overall success of an artist. So while not the astounding showman that Montgomery was, Grant Green was no less a vital guitarist and one who could generate ...