Soul Jazz and Grant Green
In the midst of the progressive 1960’s, perhaps no musical genre was considered more hopelessly passe by the hipster cognoscenti than Soul Jazz.
Based largely on the hoary I-IV-V blues chord progression and driven by the traditional gospel keyboard instrument, the Hammond B-3 organ, soul jazz was infrequently heard on rock, pop, or even most jazz radio stations. The neighborhood bar’s 45 jukebox served as the main source of the music and live appearances were typically relegated to small smoky joints deep in the inner cities where working-class folks gathered to unwind after a long day.
Soul jazz was stark, straight-forward instrumental dance music played for everyday people and performed by journeyman musicians from around the way — artistes needed not apply. And although many soul jazz artists were recorded by big record labels like Prestige and Blue Note, most releases created but a ripple during a period when an exaggerated premium was placed on avant-garde experimentation by theorist critics and poindexter neo-revolutionaries enamored by the radical statement of the totally free “New Thing” jazz music of John Coltrane or the fusion-forward sound of Miles Davis.
In this purist context, soul jazz’s R&B backbeat and groove-driven funk was dismissed as a watery hodgepodge of boogaloo melodies, classic gospel tension & release arrangements, and disposable rock n’ roll rhythms. Jazz snobs criticized the music as an unimaginative throwback to an era when saxophonists prostrated themselves honking the blues or showily walking the bar instead of engaging in mystical quests for a rarefied musical consciousness.
And unlike their more fortunate jazz music contemporaries who could occasionally hold concerts in theaters or upscale clubs, the soul jazz musician’s lot was to work nightly in sketchy roadhouses or sweaty bars on tiny, dim stages and their job description was bone simple: blow hot jams and keep the bar humming.
The soul jazz sound had few pretensions and no room for preciously introspective solos or ambiguous 30-minute modal improvisations. The almighty GROOVE was where it was at and if folks weren’t shaking their ass and drinking themselves cross-eyed to the music, those nightly bread and butter gigs would have evaporated like morning dew in the hot Mississippi sun.
Perhaps one difficulty soul jazz music encountered in its attempt to break through to a general jazz-buying public was the overwhelming number of artists who were active within the genre.
There was no one singular standout talent - like a Coltrane, Miles Davis, or an Ornette Coleman in avant-garde jazz, for example - who could spearhead the movement and become a focal point for larger audiences; in other words, a “star” who could draw critical media hype.
Instead, there were literally hundreds (thousands?) of underground ‘funky jazz’ musicians who released tons of albums during the heyday between 1964–1974 and who could typically be found gigging at strip joints, hotel bars, airport lounges, neighborhood weddings, soul food restaurants or anyplace else where the stage was big enough to fit the mammoth B-3 organ/Leslie speaker combo and a basic drum kit.
Many avatars of soul jazz began their careers as more mainstream jazz musicians or as sidemen employed by other jazz bands, but lots of superb players rarely strayed from the gutbucket jazzy funk/soul approach, basically ensuring their total anonymity with the usual [read: white] jazz fan of the era. Nearly all of their best and now most hotly sought-after records disappeared upon issue and some performers never released albums in other more critically well-regarded fields of music.
Hence, massively gifted musicians like Charles Kynard, Eddy Senay, Jimmy McGriff, Charles Earland, Johnny “Hammond” Smith, Don Patterson, Rusty Bryant, Melvin Sparks, Groove Holmes, Boogaloo Joe Jones, Freddie McCoy, Reuben Wilson, Leon Spencer, Houston Person, Billy Butler, Eddie “Funk” Fisher, Bernard “Pretty” Purdie, Freddie Roach, Brother Jack McDuff, Sonny Phillips, Bill Mason, and dozens more became obscure ghost-blips on the radar screen of jazz history despite their sublime talents.
Other more well-known musicians who arguably created their best work playing funky soul jazz include Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock, Grover Washington, Freddie Hubbard, Hank Crawford, Stanley Turrentine, Donald Byrd, Jimmy Smith, Lou Donaldson, Eddie Harris, Yusef Lateef and others. Even smooth-jazz specialist Bob James, who wrote the famous Fender Rhodes keyboard lullaby “Theme from Taxi/Angela” for television in 1975, made a couple of slick LPs on the CTI label influenced by soul jazz sounds (not to mention his one infamous avant-garde/noise session for ESP Records in late ‘60s!).
Of course, the fact that much soul jazz repertoire consisted of heavily funked-up versions of popular R&B and rock hits did little to advance its credibility with jazz purists. This despite the fact that jazz music has always maintained a long tradition of improvising on hit pop songs of the day and re-interpreting them in a ‘jazz’ vein, thereby meeting the typical audience desire to hear something they know.
Interestingly, the funky soul jazz sound quickly spread into the neo-Latin music scene emerging from New York City’s Cuban and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in the late 1960s/early ’70s, resulting in a raw and groove-heavy hybrid of Salsa music that was very danceable and which remains hotly desired by record collectors on small regional labels like Panart, Tico, Coco, Vaya, and Fania.
One artist who may perhaps be considered definitive of the whole soul jazz movement — if such a thing even exists — is St. Louis-born guitarist Grant Green who recorded dozens of records for the Delmark, Blue Note, Verve, Kudu, and Versatile labels as a leader from around 1960 to 1977, while also appearing on literally hundreds of albums by other performers. His in-demand ‘first-call’ status among recording musicians made him one of the few jazz artists whose ubiquitous studio work over a period of two decades can be accurately said to portray the sound of an entire musical genre.
Guitarists like Wes Montgomery and George Benson may certainly have received more widespread acclaim, but it was Grant Green’s intense single-note style full of lyrical melodic phrases, sleek turnarounds, and oddball staccato rhythmic figures that really birthed the instrumental palette of modern jazz-funk guitar.
Grant’s liquid playing fused pure gospel blues feeling with dirty street funk, producing an irresistibly groovy yet deep signature sound that remains clearly unique and thoroughly astonishing even forty years later. His lasting influence on every single jazz, funk, or soul guitarist after him, especially folks like Benson, Melvin Sparks, John Scofield, and Charlie Hunter, is certainly undeniable.
A completely self-taught player but nevertheless a consummate musician, Green had a country-bumpkin demeanor that belied the most fluid technique in jazz guitar history save for maybe Django Reinhardt or Pat Martino. His elegant, warm tone never lost its supple edge whether he was playing lightning-fast bebop flurries or one-chord, deep-groove nastiness and his few dozen records as leader vary in approach from Charlie Christian-inspired hard-bop to Black gospel standards to Blaxploitation soundtracks to Sly Stone, Meters, and James Brown covers; if one could possibly fit a guitar onto the recording, Grant always tore it up without fail.
Although his most critically celebrated work came during the early ‘Hard Bop’ part of his career, Grant Green’s late-period funky albums have finally been receiving some major recognition from hip record collectors, sample/beat hounds, and modern jazz aficionados worldwide.
Grant began his steady evolution from straight-up jazz into a more funky approach with his sole release on Verve Records, the rather appropriately titled “His Majesty King Funk,” released in 1965. Along with Hammond B-3 mystic Larry Young, workhorse drummer Ben Dixon, and heavy-hitting bop saxophonist Harold Vick, Green lays down thick textures and stinging, clean leads that defy the boundaries of what was typical jazz guitar at the time.
Buoyed by the just-emerging youth culture movement, he applied a loosely swinging yet restrained approach to classics like “The Cantaloupe Woman” and “Get Out Of My Life, Woman”, both soul jazz standards that went on to be covered hundreds of times by many artists. The creeping rock influence on Grant’s playing was slowly becoming increasingly evident and his famous quote, “Jazz, R&B, soul, rocknroll — it’s all just the BLUES, man!” truly clarified where he was coming from.
Larry Young (aka Khalid Yahsin) — Grant’s organist on this album and several other LPs — had a massive, swirling B-3 organ sound with a slightly psychedelic tinge which he further expanded on his own recordings, many of which were so far ahead of their time as to sound a bit spaced-out even today. Young was considered by some to be the “Coltrane of the Organ,” although his Hammond keyboard tone always retained a tough edge born on the mean streets of Newark’s ghetto no matter how ‘outside’ his playing became.
Larry Young, who infamously appeared uncredited on Miles Davis breakthrough ‘Bitches Brew’ album and who was an integral member of fusion-rock pioneers Lifetime along with John McLaughlin, Jack Bruce and Tony Williams in the early ’70s, died of liver disease and pneumonia in 1978 after his last couple of records found him addressing dance-funk in his own wholly inimitable way. Look for more in-depth analysis of Larry Young LPs in another of my forthcoming articles.
Grant’s next release, the obscure 1967 album ‘Iron City!’, really indicated where he would ultimately wind up: smokin’ guitar playing surrounded by lean arrangements full of fire and brimstone. Powered by infectious vamps and long lead lines, Green explodes on solo after solo as Big John Patton’s (another criminally unheralded musician) Hammond B-3 organ majestically churns through the melody and stalwart Dixon drums his ass off. Except for the ballad stunner “Motherless Child,” everything’s played in something approaching an up-tempo frenzy on this album and the non-stop, crushing backbeat throughout ‘Iron City!’ points the way to the fiery funkitude that would follow at the turn of the decade.
Each track on “Iron City!” builds up a boiling groove as Green exploits every chord change for maximum intensity, the standouts being the unchained title track along with the Brazilian head-nodder “Samba d ‘Orpheus,” and the proto-soul classic “High Heel Sneakers.” The stark, aggressive trio setting on this album was one of the guitarist’s best showcases to date for his fast-developing funky virtuosity and remains a personal favorite; it’s one of those records you never get tired of no matter how often it’s played.
After being off the scene between 1967 to 1969 due to drug-related problems, Green eventually returned to recording reborn with fresh ideas about music and about the difficult life led by inner-city people, inspiring him to deliver an amazing run of what may be the funkiest records ever made by a so-called jazz guitar player.
The double-LP set ‘Live at The Lighthouse’ and the also in-concert ‘Alive!’ — recorded at Newark’s infamous drug dealer hang-out The Cliché Lounge — showcase Green’s burgeoning affinity for James Brown, early Kool & the Gang, and deeply spiraling one-chord jams.
These late-night live recordings were an anomaly for the steadfastly formulaic Blue Note Records, but Green insisted that this was where his new sound could really open up and shine, not in some sterile New York studio at 2 in the afternoon.
His playing on these LPs is both free-flowing and incredibly tightly wound, a taut dichotomy that few other musicians could ever pull off. His guitar went toe-to-toe with electric piano, vibes, and an army of percussionists for the first time and the resulting music was revelatory in its soul force and unshakable grooviness.
On the ‘Alive!’ album, Green takes the Don Covay/Steve Cropper R&B classic “Sookie, Sookie” into hardcore jazz-funk terrain, teasing out line after smoldering line from his Gibson hollow body guitar, periodically laying out for the Fender Rhodes and conga breaks that now peppered his sound.
His signature track became “Down Here On The Ground,” an affecting mid-tempo ballad he used as a tribute to Wes Montgomery, a guitarist he was often compared to but actually sounded nothing like. The emotion-charged performances on these LPs were a direct result of the atmospheric club settings, fueled by the feeling of brotherhood and close support between the band and audience.
Along with an offbeat (and rather collectible) soundtrack LP for a kitschy Billy Dee Williams ‘Black Power’ melodrama called ‘The Final Come-Down,’ Green’s early 70’s studio work begins to show a man who fully identifies with the struggles of his people as his sound becomes more urban and less obviously “jazz” with every release.
The 1970 album ‘Green is Beautiful’, one of his true masterworks, features a version of James Brown’s “Ain’t It Funky Now” — which amazingly out-funks the original (a damn hard feat!) — and a cool, hypnotic take on The Beatles “A Day in the Life” as re-interpreted for inner-city folks living down on the ground.
Green’s sly reworking of melodies and rhythms on these cover tunes, however, is nothing if not real jazz as evidenced by the harmonic sophistication and melodic inventiveness he brings to these disparate-sounding tracks. ‘Green is Beautiful’ also contains the hard-swinging original “The Windjammer,” a song which was to become a staple of his and many other jazz artists’ standard repertoire.
Green’s other turn-of-the-decade classic, the ‘Carryin On’ LP from late 1969, has a stunningly deep-funk version of The Meters “Ease Back” and yet another killer James Brown tune, “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up The Door I’ll Get It Myself),” envisioned as 100% pure groove for Green’s flexible funk-jazz purposes. He would record other James Brown tracks later in the decade, including “Cold Sweat”, and also take on Stevie Wonder, Burt Bacharach, The Carpenters, and Mozart (!) amidst his own superb originals, proof positive that Green never rested on his ballyhooed jazz laurels, unlike nearly every other musician of his generation.
Despite being dismissed as sell-out “commercial” records by narrow-minded, establishment jazzbos at the time of their release, these late-period Grant Green albums broke trail for a whole slew of players who dug the modern sounds of musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Sly & The Family Stone but who were weaned on the classic jazz of an earlier era. By essentially distilling modern jazz guitar down to its rhythmic core and embellishing his own completely unique melodic style atop the hard-edged groove, Green was able to straddle both the jazz and funk worlds effortlessly and create a new musical language that would only grow over time.
His working band was always full of up-and-coming young players like sensational keyboardist Neal Creque (writer & co-arranger of many of Green’s classics), monster New Orleans drummer Idris Muhammad, and funk organist/session giant Ronnie Foster, all part of Grant’s insistence that his music was completely of today and not some echo of any previous style. His fervent eclecticism foreshadowed the commingling of all musical styles later in the decade and on into the next century in a way that no jazz musician had previously approached.
The confident musicality, agile ensemble interplay and instrumental command has always been the hallmark of old-school jazz musicians, but Green’s willingness to step outside of convention to reach out to the average non-jazz listener was nothing if not a calculated ‘pop’ move — a concept that would slowly filter down throughout the jazz world, unfortunately ending up with the deadly-dull “jazz fusion” of the late 1970s by the likes of Spyro Gyra and Jeff Lorber.
Sadly, Green’s deep life-long alcohol and drug addiction issues slowly caught up to him as the decade progressed and his health faltered in the late 70’s after years of constant gigging and self-abuse. Grant died of a heart attack in January 1979, basically penniless and almost forgotten in most jazz music circles.
But thankfully Grant Green’s mythic status as a player and visionary has now been fully restored with Hip Hop, Acid Jazz, and EDM producer culture rabidly sampling his records in search of the perfect beat or rhythm track.
Although much of Grant’s work has been officially re-released on CD, his early first-press Blue Note Records LPs still easily command 3-to-4 figure sums on the collectors market. In many minds, Grant Green will always live on safely ensconced as a true genius of jazz guitar without peer.
Jorge Cervera has been a professional musician for over 30 years and an obsessive record collector since age 12. He has over 5,000 LPs and deals vinyl online all over the world from his sprawling tumbleweed ranch near Cheyenne Wyoming.
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