HISTORY of BLACK JAZZ RECORDS

One of my favorite record collector pursuits is amassing the complete output of certain labels. It's big fun to own every LP on a particular label and hear the musical trajectory of the artists develop over time. And if you dig what one group or musician is all about, there's likely similar performers to be found in the catalog. 

Of course, this geeky wannabe-hoarder goal becomes easier with smaller labels that had fewer releases compared to behemoths like Columbia Records or even Blue Note or Prestige Records where collecting every original LP could prove a full lifetime's (expensive) pursuit. 

Some hip small record labels of special interest to me include Detroit's 1970s-empowered Tribe Records, the spiritual/modal jazz powerhouse Strata-East Records and the adventurous Cobblestone Records from NYC, all of whom released a bare handful of records in an aware style of Afro-Jazz music heavy on feeling and groove.

Black Jazz Records released only 20 or so original LPs during its short existence from about 1971-1975. All the original pressing Black Jazz LP titles are in heavy demand and some have become exorbitantly priced over the years. In a nod to the short-lived 4-speaker 'Quad' era of Hi-Fi, many of the original albums were recorded in true Quadraphonic sound (stereo compatible). 

The label's biggest 'star' was perhaps keyboardist/composer Walter Bishop Jr., famous for playing BeBop jazz as Charlie Parker's pianist, but found here in funky pan-Afrodelic regalia for his two stellar Black Jazz releases. Another Black Jazz stalwart was keyboardist/composer Doug Carn who along with his then-wife Jean Carn put out four stunning records for the label, each a minor masterpiece of post-Coltrane spiritual funk-jazz dopeness. 

The executive director responsible for gathering these fuzzy lights of the underground jazz scene was soul-jazz pianist (and occasional actor) Gene Russell who recorded the first LPs on the label and produced many Black Jazz releases for other artists. Unfortunately, the label's independent distribution ensured the records stayed scarce and, likely, few Black Jazz titles sold much over 25,000 original copies, accounting for their rarity today in mint condition. 

The private-press look of the early jackets probably didn't help sales: a basic black & white cardboard cover repeated on both sides. They may appear low-budget to some, but the homespun look of the first Black Jazz LPs remain crudely endearing to us record collector geeks.

This is the kind of head-noddingly funky modal jazz and instrumentally expansive funk/soul you'll rarely hear on the radio (even then), but to my ear it remains among the most intelligently played and satisfying, multi-layered music found anywhere. I hope to address every Black Jazz release in chronological catalog order. And yes collectors, these are all original first-pressing LPs!

Black Jazz Records #5 CALVIN KEYS 'Shawn-Neeq'

From the very first majestic wave of sound on 'Shawn-Neeq', it's clear guitarist Calvin Keys is setting off on an inspired, mystical trip. Rarely is instrumental music so perfectly conceived and executed with such fire and precision that it creates its own torsioned universe. The molten interplay and interlocking dynamics of the band display a command of an unspoken, bottomless musical language part funk-jazz, part Coltrane-ian modalism and unfailingly grooves hard throughout. The title track ranks as one of the top experiences in funky/spiritual jazz, glowing with a warm, burnished hue for its full 6 minutes as Keys' guitar and Larry Nash's Rhodes electric piano meld into a lovely, drifting wash of organic sound. The second side contains only two long tracks, 'Gee-Gee' and 'BK', both of which take jazz guitar into the stellar regions of  the wonderful. Without doubt every track here is a classic of the genre. I can not recommend this LP enough. One of my favorite albums perhaps topped only by Keys' other Black Jazz release 'Proceed With Caution' (reviewed elsewhere in this blog).

Black Jazz Records #4 - RUDOLPH JOHNSON 'Spring Rain'

                                                                                                                                                                                              Perhaps one of the most straight-up jazz releases of the Black Jazz Records catalog, the little-known saxophonist's first of two LPs on the label finds him in a swinging hard-bop mood, although not above a killer breakbeat or two in the stone classic 'Diswa' or downtown jazz-funk dance moves in 'Devon Jean'. Tightly floating tenor sonorities ricochet off boundless open space in this great 1972 acoustic recording, basically presaging the German mid-70s ECM Records sound with a deep-focus soundstage, judicious use of reverbed room echo and a great 'out-front' horn tone. Late night mellow gold.

Black Jazz Records #3 - DOUG CARN 'Infant Eyes'

After recording a rather straight Hammond B-3 organ trio LP for Savoy Records in the mid-1960s, Doug Carn's music became informed with his new-found Muslim spiritual beliefs on 'Infant Eyes', his 1971 LP and first of four released on Black Jazz Records. Joined by wife Jean Carn on operatic space-soul vocals, this is music infused with call-to-prayer incantations that soars freely and echoes within its own still spaces. Amid stately Fender Rhodes washes and sustained B-3 minor chords, complex harmonic snake-charming from flute, tenor sax, trombone and trumpet underpin Jean's righteous jazz vocals which are indebted to June Tyson's tough grit and welded to a sweet-singing Dinah Washington-like sense of phrase. Inventive, sensitive re-imaginings of John Coltrane's 'Welcome', 'Acknowledgement' and 'Peace' make plain the lineage of this music back to classic modern jazz but with a new fresh take via early 1970s revolutionary culture. A fantastic, quietly funky listening experience.

Black Jazz Records #2 - WALTER BISHOP JR Coral Keys

Serious grooves and deep Afro-centric flavor here on rippling Steinway piano from Charlie Parker's late-period accompanist/ band leader. 'Soul Turnaround' is perhaps one of the top five tracks within the 'rare groove' genre and showcases a juggernaut rhythmic propulsion coupled with a sweet samba-feel descending scale lick that lingers in your head as it makes your body uncontrollably shake around for its entire 8 minutes. 'Coral Keys' is another funky, smoky modal swinger featuring New Orleans monster drummer Idris Muhammad laying it down heavy & hot from the bass drum up, alongside horn giant Harold Vick and trumpet virtuoso Woody Shaw. A superbly funky jazz LP and a perfect foreshadowing of the more electric sounds awaiting in the wings of the Black Jazz Records stable.

KENNY BARRON - 'Peruvian Blue'

Another of my recent Los Angeles digs, this is a surprisingly hard-to-find LP from pianist/ composer Kenny Barron who's released a boatload of superb hard-bop flavored albums throughout his long career. Barron's virtuosic Fender Rhodes and Clavinet work -- instruments he usually rarely played -- is mysterious, intensely spiritual and deeply funky on the 10-minute modal-monster title track. Another nearly 10-minute opus, "Two Areas", deftly mixes warm electric piano and Albert Heath's downtempo samba-tinged drumming into an undulating, subdued dance of shifting counterpoint and snaky Latin rhythm. Guitarist Ted Dunbar -- a co-conspirator with Barron on several LPs and a severely under-heralded jazz guitar genius-- also consistently shines here and adds spacious chordal textures and tangy solos everywhere he appears. On "Blue Monk", Barron even manages to re-vitalize the classic Thelonious Monk standard without having to deconstruct the tune, revealing a breathtaking technique and a lyrical understanding of Monk's seemingly angular style. Exhilarating, spiritual electric jazz.

EDDIE HARRIS - 'Is It In'

One the funkiest, most freakily tripped-out, and (of course!) highly collectable LPs of tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris' many, many records, Is It In released in early 1974 remains a funk-synth groove-jazz landmark. Eddie's edgy electric sax is processed through Moog pitch-tracking effects designed especially for him on this album allowing his horn to sound like a treated Clavinet piano or Fender Rhodes keyboards or an eerie mournful lute -- often all at once. Rufus Reid and William James provide slinky electro-rhythms underneath on bass, drums and electric bongos while Ronald Muldrow's intensely processed 'GuitarOrgan' alternates between vocoder and chicken-scratch funk sounds. It's amazing how perfectly modern many of these warm analog tracks still sound when dropped in any dance club today. The heavily sampled opener 'Funkaroma' is pure hard-groove, robotic synth-ghetto get-down and 'It's War' with its long hypnotic funky vamp are both standout tracks. Harris put out so many records during this mid-1970s era that some were bound to be duds or come off like indiscriminate jokey gags. But Is It In is a cohesive, sinewy, and deeply forward-thinking work -- a minor masterpiece really-- and a killer soundtrack for rockin' Saturday night downtempo electro-funk jams with the ladies. Highly recommended.

HAL GALPER - 'The Guerrilla Band'

I've been on a non-stop '70s Fender Rhodes electric piano LP collecting frenzy so this was definitely a lovely dig during a recent trip to California. One of the defining Rhodes jazz-funk records of the era, keyboardist Hal Galper's debut as a leader can be a tricky Mainstream Records title to track down, especially in minty shape like this WLP [White Label Promotional] copy. Galper's aggressively driving approach here has a powerful, swirling quality that's complex, modal and quite adventurously funky at times. The Guerilla Band is a searching and furious Fender Rhodes keyboard workout akin to the work of The Awakening's Ken Chaney on Black Jazz Records, another master of the instrument, or perhaps a slightly more fast-paced Eddie Russ approach. "Figure Eight" sounds exactly like its title, full of crisscrossing angular swoops of Bob Mann's searing electric guitar and Galper's fuzzy keyboard lines swimming amidst electric bassist Victor Gaskin and drummer Charles Alias's space-funk bottom. Slickster L.A. studio stalwarts the Brecker brothers make early recording appearances here and actually sound nicely textural and 'in the pocket' with little overblown schmaltz compared to their blaring later efforts. Mysterious, mesmerizing music and superior to Galper's other (but still very highly desirable) LPs on the Mainstream label.

Adventures in Cool Music: FREE-JAZZ & SUN RA

Welcome, musical iconoclasts ! .....

This is a slightly different music column that will generally avoid the usual pop, rock & jazz fare. Instead, our focus will be upon seminal but little-heard music in all genres that remains in need of fresh rediscovery. Adventures in Cool Music will become a compendium of records & artists with the mark of singular greatness upon them but which – for one reason or another– slipped through the net of public perception to land in commercial oblivion. Such musical excavations are not only about outing obscurities for the sake of their rarity but serve as arguments against the soul-sapping reductionism of the corporate music industry which continues to stagnate around an ever-decreasing crop of "radio-friendly" artists and arena-filling acts. Predictably, many of the musical pioneers that will appear on this site languished in poverty and never experienced mass success. But does that mean they were failures? ...Only if achievement is measured with a calculator. The thrill and joy of musical creativity lives on within these rare grooves.


FREE JAZZ & SUN RA

Avant-garde jazz, or "free-jazz" as commonly known, could well be the most difficult and theoretical music in the Western canon. Developed mostly on acoustic instruments (sax, trumpet, piano, upright bass, trap drums, et al.) primarily by black American virtuoso musicians, it is hard to think of a more superficially austere yet spiritually dense and ultimately rewarding listening experience. Originally stemming from the angular, fast-moving Be-Bop jazz of the mid-40's and the driving, soulful hard-bop of the 1950s, avant-garde jazz came into full flower during the counter-cultural flux of the 1960's when the music seemed to bespeak the raw emotions – the violence, sadness, passion & love – emerging from the civil rights/anti-war experience. Although the movement eventually petered out with the inevitable conservative backlash of the mid-1970's, the music still remains as testament to a legion of brave, forward-thinking artists who placed creativity and expression above the lure of the almighty dollar.

By turns chaotic and lyrical, free jazz resists easy tropes. The traditional musical cornerstones of melody, rhythm and harmonic progression are mostly abandoned in avant-jazz replaced by a radical approach "free" of the shackles of Western (read: white) musical rules but yet tangentially indebted to the experimental music of Europeans like Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, and Erik Satie. Some conservatory-trained musicians who plumbed their deepest psyches for inspiration during this period concluded that the new jazz music called for a fresh, explosive instrumental language based on shaping slabs of pure sound instead of merely regurgitating sets of chords and notes. Basic academic precepts like smooth intonation, well-tempered harmony and predictable meter were to be eschewed in this free style, evidenced by saxophonist Archie Shepp’s incandescent quote, "Where my own life and art suffice, I disregard Western musical thought altogether." Composers like Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler created solos and improvisations that could evoke devastating pain or ethereal beauty sometimes within the same free-flowing piece. The movement was savagely pounded by many establishment critics at the time as "anti-jazz" played by militant charlatans and it generally sold poorly in the stores. Even the Be-Bop era's innovators like Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis found the "New Thing" to be musically untenable and loudly voiced their disdain despite having suffered similar slings & arrows during their own heyday. Indeed, it is this very same provocative volatility that has ensured avant-garde jazz remains outside the scope of facile appraisal or mass co-option by the marketplace and also explains why it's one of the few Western sounds able to withstand the overwhelming homogenizing pressure of pop culture. It is probably safe to presume most listeners are baffled by a music seemingly without rules and corporations can’t effectively sell products to the strains of what is sheer cacophony to many ears. Hell, you can’t even dance to it! But this forbidding, noisy aura shrouds a forceful musical essence that places unfettered, visceral creativity – or "the ugly beauty" as pianist Thelonious Monk called it – on transparent display, creating a true, primal soundtrack of unchained sonic revolution amidst societal upheaval.

Certainly the greatest name in avant-garde jazz is saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-1967) who began his career in the late 1940's as a huge-toned disciple of tenor titans like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins and R&B-based jazz honkers such as Illinois Jacquet and Ike Quebec. Coltrane first gained international superstar status in the highly-acclaimed Miles Davis groups of the 1950's for his lengthy solos and unique "sheets-of-sound" modal hard-bop style before eventually forming his own band and recording dozens of modern jazz masterworks including Blue Train, My Favorite Things, Giant Steps, and A Love Supreme. But around late 1963, Coltrane turned his back on the mainstream and embarked upon an epic journey of musical exploration driven by a restless spiritual need, coupled with a mental stamina unequaled by any musician in the 20th century. Coltrane sold millions of records worldwide during and after his career and is rightfully credited with being the spearhead of the avant-garde jazz movement. But it’s the little-known composer and pianist Sun Ra (1914-1993) who is perhaps the true father of avant-garde jazz and who served as a direct influence on Coltrane’s quest for an expanded musical consciousness.

Sun Ra, who was renown for wearing resplendent regalia and claiming he was from Saturn as far back as the 1930's, led a big-band called The Interstellar Solar Myth-Science Arkestra for nearly 40 years with many of the key musicians remaining in the band the entire time (!). It was Sun Ra’s two fiery saxophonists, John Gilmore and Marshall Allen, who both often played in a free style similar to what Coltrane would later develop as far back as 1956. On record and in live performance, Sun Ra’s music veered wildly from vaguely straight-ahead Be-Bop to Latin-tinged exotica to berserk free-form meltdowns accompanied by eerie chants about the solar system and historical Africa. On peak mid-period 1960's albums like The Nubians of Plutonia, Pathways to Unknown Worlds, The Magic City, Angels & Demons At Play, Crystal Spears and The Bad And Beautiful, Sun Ra and The Arkestra spin tangled sonic webs of intense improvisational genius– dark, kinetic and bursting with searing piano / keyboard lines and collective horn freak-outs that would probably send any modern punk-rocker screaming from the room. Simply stated, this music is not for the faint-hearted and it easily rivals any rock band in both sheer power and unbridled intensity. And all this ruckus with largely acoustic instruments from musicians dressed in robes no less!

Interestingly, Sun Ra is credited with being one of the very first composers to employ analog electronics in a jazz recording when he used an early electric keyboard prototype in "Advice to Medics" on 1954's Supersonic Sounds LP. He was also one of the first to use a Moog synthesizer on record during the My Brother, The Wind sessions in the mid-1960's and he regularly incorporated sundry instruments from various countries in his recordings long before "world music" became vogue. His somewhat mellower late-1970's / 1980's recordings showcase Ra’s life-long affinity for Swing-era sounds (Fletcher Henderson, Benny Goodman) and are masterpieces of slightly fractured big band jazz. Further, Sun Ra was also one of the first to privately press his own independent records, a basic idea in today’s DIY music scene. He released an astounding 300 or so albums during his lifetime, most on his own self-financed, produced, and distributed Saturn Records, a practice which allowed him to survive outside the realm of the corporate music marketplace. Many of his LPs were first issued with hand-painted covers in very small batches and all the original Saturn LPs now command very hefty sums on the collectors’ market. Evidence Records re-issued about 30 of his classic titles on CD in the 1990s and it’s a good place to get Sun Ra music at a reasonable cost. Ra’s 1972 film "Space Is The Place" found some infamy on the art-house movie circuit as a post-psychedelic hybrid of free-jazz magick, social documentary, and blaxploitation kitsch and is highly recommended on DVD. Although Sun Ra’s appeal to the general public or even to most jazz fans remains fairly minimal, his influence on modern music including rock and funk is very significant. Artists as diverse as David Bowie, The MC 5, Sonic Youth, Phish, Parliament-Funkadelic, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, NRBQ, Bootsy Collins and John Cage all cite Ra’s music as a pivotal influence and a few have even attempted to cover his songs on their own albums.

The ultimate and lofty goal of all this high-minded musical abstraction was markedly singular: ecstatic peace. The special communion between deep spirituality and music is explicit in much avant-garde jazz and many Ra titles like Interplanetary Consciousness, Beyond Sin & Thought, Space Ankh, Interstellar Force and We Travel The Spaceways manage to invoke astral journeys, jazz music, and worship of a higher being almost interchangeably. A lifelong teetotaler and vegetarian, Sun Ra’s alien mysticism and guru-like control over the organization and strict regimen of his band became legendary and he was famous for making enigmatic, poetic pronouncements on subjects ranging from UFOs to bio-molecular science to religion to communal living. Ra’s fixation with ancient Egyptology, extraterrestrials, time travel, and all things metaphysical was sometimes perceived as a weird 'out-there' gimmick. In actuality, his philosophy worked as an empowering belief system in which the struggles of the Black race were soon to be rewarded by the cosmic freedom promised in the outer space of the future; Sun Ra's music envisioned an ever-expanding universe of Black people and a pan-African world with colored folks fully in command of their politics and culture.

Always personally suspicious of all politicians and centralized power structures on either the right or left, Sun Ra’s latent championing by the era’s nascent hippie culture was only one example of the way avant-garde jazz became aligned with revolutionary street spirit. It may also mark the last instance of any jazz music, originally born and raised in the ghetto, still having some emotional resonance with the people down on the ground it purported to serve. Unfortunately, current jazz has collapsed into a sorry state no thanks to easy-listening Weather Channel-theme fodder and flaccid smooth-jazz radio formats. But way back in the day, jazz music was as alive and vital as the turbulent protests and fervent shouts for equal rights. Social change and political Black consciousness may certainly have been the controversial matrix of the new avant-garde jazz but Sun Ra never once preached any hatred or separatism, only pure love. On his bright glowing planet, everyone of all colors vibrated sympathetically to the same wonderfully crazy celestial beat.

J. A. Cervera has been a professional musician for over
25 years and an obsessive record collector since age 12.
He has many thousands of LPs and deals vinyl online
all over the world from his home in Livingston, Montana.

Please send any obtuse comments to:
souljazzbass@gmail.com

Adventures In Cool Music: GRANT GREEN

SOUL-JAZZ & GRANT GREEN

During the turbulent and hipper-than-thou late 1960's, perhaps no musical genre was considered more hopelessly 'old-school' than Soul Jazz. Based largely on the standard 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. The local ghetto bar's 45 jukebox was the true home of the music and live appearances were usually relegated to small, smoky joints buried deep within the inner cities of the Midwest and Northeast in shady dives where working-class folks gathered to drink and unwind after a long day. This was straight-forward music played for everyday people and performed by journeyman musicians from around the way -- effete artiste-types needed not apply. Although plenty of soul-jazzers were recorded by big-time record labels like Prestige and Blue Note, many of the albums sold weakly during a time when an exaggerated premium was placed on avant-garde experimentation by theorist jazz critics and poindexter neo-revolutionaries enamored by the radical socio-political statement of the totally free "New Thing" music.

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 a trite throwback to an era when saxophonists prostrated themselves honking the blues or walking the bar for tips instead of engaging in neo-mystical, rarefied quests for higher musical consciousness or -- at least -- dutifully reviving Louis Armstrong riffs. And unlike their more fortunate musical contemporaries who could occasionally hold jazz concerts in theater halls or upscale clubs, the soul-jazz musician's lot was to work nightly in sketchy roadhouses or sweat-soaked bars offering dim, tiny stages and the job description was bone simple: provide hot dance music for the rowdy masses. The soul-jazz sound had few pretensions and no room for precious soul-searching solos or ambiguous 40-minute modal improvisations. The almighty GROOVE was where it was at and if people weren't shaking their ass and drinking themselves cross-eyed to the music, baby, you better believe those bread and butter gigs would have evaporated like wet dew in the hot morning sun.

Perhaps one difficulty soul-jazz music encountered in its attempt to break through to the 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 John Coltrane or an Ornette Coleman in avant-garde jazz, who could spearhead the soul-jazz 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' artists 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 organ and hold a drum kit. Many avatars of soul-jazz began their careers as more mainstream jazz musicians or as sidemen employed by other bands, but lots of superb players rarely strayed from the gutbucket, ghetto-bred funk-soul-jazz format, hence basically ensuring their total anonymity with the usual (read: white) jazz fan. Nearly all their best and now most intensely sought-after records largely disappeared from view upon issue and some performers never released records in other more well-regarded fields of music.

Therefore, massively gifted musicians like Charles Kynard, Eddie 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, Billy Butler, Eddie "Funk" Fisher, Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, Freddie Roach, Brother Jack McDuff, Sonny Phillips, Bill Mason and dozens more became obscure 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, Donald Byrd, Jimmy Smith, Lou Donaldson, Eddie Harris, Yusef Lateef and others. Even MOR specialist Bob James, who wrote the famous Fender Rhodes-driven "Theme from Taxi" for television in 1975 had made a couple of earlier LPs on the CTI label bursting with fierce soul-jazz sounds (not to mention his infamous avant 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 a boatload 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 fifteen years 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 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 George Benson, Melvin Sparks, John Scofield, and Charlie Hunter -- is certainly undeniable.

A completely un-schooled, 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 three dozen or so 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 later-period funky albums have finally been receiving some major recognition from hip record collectors, sample-hounds and jazz cognoscenti 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 bop saxophonist Harold Vick, Green lays down thick textures and stingingly 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 loose, 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 others -- had a massively swirling B-3 organ sound with slightly psychedelic vibe 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. Young, who infamously appeared uncredited on Miles Davis breakthrough 'Bitches Brew' album and who was an integral member of the band Lifetime along with John McLaughlin, Jack Bruce and Tony Williams in the early '70s, died of liver disease & pneumonia in 1978 after his last couple of records found him addressing fusion/dance-funk in his own wholly inimitable way. Watch for a much more in-depth analysis of Larry Young LPs on subsequent Adventures in Cool Music.

Grant's next release, the rare 1967 album 'Iron City!', really showed where he would ultimately wind up: smokin' guitar playing surrounded by unique 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 under-heralded musician) B-3 organ majestically churns in the background and stalwart Dixon drums his ass off. Everything's played in something approaching an up-tempo frenzy on this album -- except for the ballad stunner "Motherless Child" -- 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 builds up a hot groove as Green exploits every chord change for maximum intensity, the standouts being the unchained title track, the Brazilian head-nodder "Samba d'Orpheus" and the proto-soul classic "High Heel Sneakers." The lean, take-no-prisoners 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 serving a prison sentence for drug possession in the late 1960's, Green eventually returned to recording reborn as a Muslim 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 Cliche' Lounge -- showcase Green's burgeoning affinity for James Brown, early Kool & the Gang, and spiraling one-chord extended 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, an odd dichotomy that few other musicians could ever manage. 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 force and unshakeable grooviness. On the 'Alive' album, Green takes the Don Covay/Steve Cropper R&B classic "Sookie, Sookie" into some 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 band and audience.


Along with a funky-crazy (and seriously collectable) soundtrack LP for a kitschy Billy Dee Williams 'Black-Power' melodrama called 'The Final Countdown,' 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 hipster versions 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 ghetto folks actually living down on the ground. His sly reworking of melodies and rhythms on these cover tunes, however, is nothing if not true jazz as evidenced by the harmonic sophistication and melodic inventiveness he brings to these rather 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. His other turn-of-the decade LP classic, 'Carryin' On' 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, 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 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 command of instrumentation has always been the hallmark of old-school jazz musicians, but the willingness to experiment and 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, at times unfortunately resulting in the deadly-dull "fusion" of the mid 1970s.
Green's own life-long alcohol and drug addiction slowly caught up to him as the 1970s progressed and his health seriously faltered in the late 70's after years of constant gigging and merciless self-abuse. Grant died of a massive heart attack in January 1979, penniless and forgotten in most jazz music circles. Thankfully, his god-like status has now been fully restored with Hip-Hop culture rabidly sampling his records in search of the perfect beat and rhythm track. Although much of Grant's work has been officially re-released on CD, his early first-press Blue Note LPs still easily command 3-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.

SUN RA & HIS SOLAR-MYTH ARKESTRA 'The Solar Myth Approach - Vol.2'

SUN RA & HIS SOLAR-MYTH ARKESTRA

"The Solar Myth Approach-Volume 2"

1970, Actuel Records


One of the more recent additions to my nearly 75-LP strong Sun Ra collection, this release finds the Saturnian legend in full-on beserker mode in 1970. The keyboard/horn freakout in the opener "The Utter Nots" is unchained from the get-go and only further melts down into a glorious caterwaul of pure sound as it slithers along for 11 minutes, leaving no doubt as to where Mr.Ra was really born -- outer space, dude! The unearthly sounds extracted from his rickety Hohner and RMI keyboards veer between alarming mangy-cat-strangling-inside-of-an-amplified-can tones and mellifluous heavily-reverbed chord clusters that presaged dub-reggae production techniques by 5 years. Sun Ra is one of the very few electric keyboardists who you can hear lay down one chord and tell exactly who it is without doubt. The great long-time Arkestra vocalist June Tyson sings the wonderful "Strange Worlds" with a palpable joy borne of either slavish technique or preternatural abandon while Marshall Allen, John Gilmore, Pat Patrick , Danny Davis, Danny Thompson -- all stunning musicians who could have made a ton of money as session players but stayed solely with the Arkestra for 30 years or more -- provide the seriously off-kilter yet perfectly organic horn/reed charts that are their private trademark... This stuff is just completely what music should be all about. Way fun, slightly nutty and truly awe-inspiring!

PAT MARTINO Baiyina: The Clear Evidence

Pat Martino

"Baiyina: (A Psychedelic Excursion Through the Magical Mysteries of the Koran)

1968, Prestige Records



Wow... Killer, nicely weirded-out tripfest from guitarist Pat Martino. Heavy on heady sitars, tamboura and tabla, this is an ultra-rare release from one of the greatest and most adventurous jazz guitarists of all time. At this point, Martino was thoroughly entranced by Eastern mysticism and John Coltrane [who wasn't?] and the result is a cauldron of mesmerizing ostinato guitar figures set against angular backdrops of Indian polyrhythms and shape-shifting harmonics. This is perhaps one of the oddest releases on the normally straight-ahead soul-jazz torchbearer Prestige Records and an album that has long been considered a definitive document of both flower-power avant-jazz and exploratory world music symbiosis. Bassist Richard Davis is simply on fire here and holds together even the furthest-flung 7/4, 10/8 and 9/4 time signatures like he's playing root-fives over a 4/4 beat. The twelve-minute title track and the thirteen-minute "Distant Lands" are exotic-sounding attempts to convey the culture & the homilies of the Koran via music. It's exciting, exquisite stuff that frequently drifts cloud-like into dark, billowy formations of pure sound and texture furiously powered by whirling dervish beats.... His earlier release on Prestige, the superb "East!" , explored similar terrain in a more strict jazz-guitar based template -- but with equally stunning results.

Black Jazz Records #18 - CALVIN KEYS 'Proceed With Caution'

CALVIN KEYS
'Proceed With Caution'
1974, Black Jazz Records #18








One of the dopest albums on the sublime Black Jazz Records out of Chicago, guitarist Calvin Keys' second LP for the label ups both the musical complexity and the hard street vibe over his earlier, more straight-ahead, but still freakin' amazing 'Shawn-Neeq' album. The sound here is super-dense and constantly roiling, filled with tons of heavy electric piano and, as usual, simply amazing bass work from the best bassist no one's ever heard of, Henry Franklin (who actually released two LPs on Black Jazz himself). Intermingled with free-wheeling snatches of hairy avant jazz-funk like the title track and the intense modal guitar workout of 'Efflugence', you'll find groovy jump-toned paeans to 'Aunt Lovey' and the chilled-out , smooth-move heaven of 'Renaissance'. Another Black Jazz stalwart, keyboardist Kirk Lightsey, alternately pounds and strokes his Fender Rhodes electric piano into submission and the interplay between him and Keys' stun-funk guitar is pure improv magic. Like every other Black Jazz release, I can't recommend this record enough.