Author: Francois

The real thing

- Francois Leave a comment

GRANT GREEN AND JACK KINSELLA –

Jack Kinsella

We heard from guitarist Jack Kinsella, a fine straightforward jazz guitarist from The Hague, The Netherlands, who also plays in the positively charming country band The Good, The Bad & The English. Kinsella uploaded a couple of rare tunes from The Real Thing session from tenor saxophonist Houston Person featuring guitarist Grant Green and organist Brother Jack McDuff.

Of course, all participants are the grooviest, but as a guitarist, of course Kinsella is specifically interested in ‘hero’ Grant Green, also a Flophouse Favorite as everybody who trespasses the premises frank and free is well aware of. In the early 1970’s, Grant Green had moved from New York City to Detroit. The most prolific artist of Blue Note in the early 1960’s, even eclipsing chart magnet Jimmy Smith as far as number of sessions is concerned, he gradually vanished from the scene in the mid-1960’s, largely due to his addiction to narcotics.

Green returned at the end of the decade, inspired by his feature on organist Reuben Wilson’s Love Bug and, with strong support of Francis Wolff, set up a new career as jazz funk guitarist. Green made a series of great albums, revered nowadays as jazz funk classics by aficionados (though there always has been a strong segment that considered him a sell-out to real jazz at this point) and good sellers. Although Green remained quite frustrated at not having reached the kind of fame like Kenny Burrell, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery, who had passed away in 1968 after a run of extremely successful commercial albums.

Green was recently divorced and bought a house in Detroit. Motor City had always been a place where black people, secured of regular jobs in the automobile factories, owned more homes in general than elsewhere in the USA. Motown had left to Los Angeles but people still appreciated good ‘n’ groovy black music. One of the centerpieces of action was Watt’s Club Mozambique. How great the atmosphere and music was at this club can be heard on organist Lonnie Smith’s Live At Club Mozambique (recorded in 1970) and Green’s Live At Club Mozambique, (recorded in 1971 and also featuring Person and Muhammad) both ‘previously unreleased’ Blue Note albums from, respectively, 1995 and 2006.

Houston Person - The Real Thing
Grant Green - Live At Club Mozambique
Grant Green

Green was a regular musician on the stand of Club Mozambique. Another album, The Real Thing, by the great tenor saxophonist Houston Person, a double LP, was recorded in March 1973 and released the same year on Eastbound. It featured, in different line-ups, trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, organists Brother Jack McDuff and Sonny Phillips, bassist (and Motown ‘Funk Brother’ legend) James Jamerson, drummers Idris Muhammad and Hank Brown and singers Etta Jones and Spanky Wilson. A solid album of pop, funk, blues and ballads. Listen to The Ohio Players’s Pain here.

Green appeared on five tracks on the official release. Kinsella found a bonus track on a compilation CD, Lester Leaps In, listen here. Great to hear Green, McDuff and Person in a straight-ahead mode. Next, Kinsella uploaded the funky Grazy Legs from the CD version, better quality than the vinyl rip, listen here.

Kinsella also mentions an upload from Big John Patton’s Blue John album featuring Grant Green from 1963, only released on CD in Japan in 2004, five bonus tracks including Green’s Jean de Fleur, five months before Green’s recording on his seminal Idle Moments, listen here.

Green is beautiful.

Clifford Jordan Beyond Paradiso (NJA 2024)

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Clifford found his Jordanaires in Holland.

Clifford Jordan - Beyond Paradiso

Personnel

Clifford Jordan (tenor saxophone), Cees Slinger (piano), Ruud Jacobs (bass), Han Bennink (drums), Steve Boston (percussion); Jacques Schols (bass), Martin van Duynhoven (drums)

Recorded

on September 10, 1969 at VARA studio, Hilversum; on June 3, 1970 at Paradiso, Amsterdam

Released

as NJA 2401 in 2024

Track listing

Vienna
Impressions Of Scandinavia
Doug’s Prelude
Quagadougou
Girl, You’ve Got A Home
I Can’t Get Started
The Girl From Ipanema


Unmistakable tone defines the greats, whether it’s icons like Lester Young or John Coltrane or acquired tastes like Lucky Thompson or Clifford Jordan. You’ll spot Jordan in a cacophony of thousands. Lovely tone. Clear as a blue sky, pure as goat’s milk. His tone is a precious satin cloth that traveled westward through the Silk Road. A touch of the blues. A dog’s wail from the back porch.

Chicago-born. Middle name: Laconia. This is also the title of an exciting Latin-tinged tune from his fourth Blue Note debut album Cliff Craft from 1957. Jordan was a promising, Rollins-inspired tenor saxophonist who found himself a spot in the vanguard of hard bop, recording with Art Blakey, Lee Morgan, Horace Silver and Max Roach.

As the years went by, Jordan followed a progressive route, playing with Charles Mingus in the 1960’s alongside Eric Dolphy. He was interested in the movement of black rights and consciousness. Typically, Jordan wanted to take matters in his own hands and produced recordings of favorite artists and himself under the heading of The Dolphy Series. Though his efforts of releasing those tapes by himself stranded, his recordings eventually found a home on the groundbreaking Strata-East label from Stanley Cowell and Charles Tolliver. Jordan’s participation in Strata-East and influence on the avant garde is a feat that is too often neglected.

Glass Bead Games, often cited as a perennial favorite by jazz fans and a major inspiration to following generations of players, was released by Strata-East in 1973. Part of that album represented the start of a stellar quartet that would come to be known as The Magic Triangle: Jordan, Cedar Walton, Sam Jones and Billy Higgins.

A year before, Strata-East released In This World, a set of original tunes by Jordan from 1969, featuring Don Cherry, Kenny Dorham, Julian Priester, Wynton Kelly, Richard Davis and drummers Ed Blackwell, Roy Haynes and Albert Heath.

It is the repertoire of In This World that, among others, is played by Jordan on a top-notch new release by the Dutch Jazz Archive: Beyond Paradiso. Jordan was booked to play in Paradiso, Amsterdam’s hub of the counterculture movement in 1969, but the club was closed for a month due to circumstances and Jordan and his band of Dutch stalwarts – pianist Cees Slinger, bassist Ruud Jacobs and drummer Han Bennink – were transferred to the VARA studio in Hilversum. A year later, Jordan was offered a second chance and played in Paradiso with Slinger, bassist Jacques Schols and drummer Martin van Duynhoven.

The Hilversum date is positively explosive. Jordan presents a ballad, Doug’s Prelude, a hip blues line, Quagadougou, and Vienna and Impressions Of Scandinavia, both enticing modal canvases, open for a lot of suggestions, and everybody rises to the occasion, Slinger in a McCoy/Herbie-inspired role and the tandem of Jacobs/Bennink notably propulsive. At times, Jordan wails like a gladiator to the gods, but, typically, he always remains in balance, flowing with long graceful lines. There never is any strain, a great feat. As liner note writer Tom Beek says – he did a great job by the way – Jordan is quite the king of understatement.

At Paradiso, though the sound, not surprisingly, is a bit dry and muffled, Jordan kept up his charged but balanced playing and, this time, plays the standards I Can’t Get Started, The Girl From Ipanema and Jordan’s Girl, You’ve Got A Home, the latter, which applies to the whole program of Beyond Paradiso, making abundantly clear that the Dutch cats convincingly stood their ground.

In this world, better said, flood, of archival releases, this applies to the Dutch Jazz Archive as well.

Clifford Jordan

Buy Beyond Paradiso at Nederlands Jazz Archief here.

The Vara show is also available on vinyl.

Louis Smith Prancin’ (Steeplechase 1979)

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Mr. Smith goes to Copenhagen. As a matter of speaking.

Louis Smith - Prancin

Personnel

Louis Smith (trumpet, flugelhorn), Junior Cook (tenor saxophone), Roland Hanna (piano), Sam Jones (bass), Billy Hart (drums)

Recorded

on April 13, 1979 in New York

Released

as SCS 1121 in 1979

Track listing

Side A:
One For Nils
Chanson de Louise
Ryan’s Groove
Side B:
Prancin’
I Can’t Get Started
Fats

Short but sweet. That is what you would call the career of trumpeter Louis Smith in the late 1950’s. There’s one session from Transition that was purchased by Blue Note: Here Comes Louis Smith featuring Cannonball Adderley credited as ‘Buckshot La Funke’. A month later, Smith walked into the studio of Rudy van Gelder in Hackensack, New Jersey, meeting up with Charlie Rouse, Sonny Clark, Paul Chambers and Art Taylor: Smithville. Treasured Blue Note goodies for the jazz geek, excellent stuff, the latter, as yours truly is concerned, having the upper hard bop hand.

Memphis, Tennessee-born Smith was the nephew of Booker Little. Now there’s a hip trumpet blood lineage. While attending University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, young lion Smith shed wood with the likes of Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Stitt. Smith quit the scene after his Blue Note releases and focused on band directing at Booker T. Washington and University of Michigan and teaching at Ann Arbor public schools. After long radio silence, Smith reappeared on the Danish Steeplechase label of Nils Winther in the late 1970’s. Steeplechase was a safe haven for many stalwarts of mainstream jazz during the fusion and disco-infested years of torture. We’re talking Duke Jordan, Kenny Drew, Horace Parlan, Jimmy Knepper, Chet Baker, Walt Dickerson, Tete Montoliu, Hilton Ruiz and many more. It is still going strong as one of the to-go-to independent jazz labels. Quite a feat.

Smith recorded no less than twelve albums for Steeplechase from 1978 to 2004, though he remarkably succeeded to stay under the radar of the jazz universe until the end of his life in 2016. Dutch pianist and concert organizer Rein de Graaff, always on the hunt for unsung heroes, invited Smith to perform during De Graaff’s famed Stoomcursus Bebop lectures and concerts in The Netherlands. As he recounted recently, De Graaff also played with Smith in Detroit in the famed Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, “before an all-black audience.” De Graaff: “He was a very sweet man. The Steeplechase albums are good in general, but his Blue Note period is the real deal. Back then he was in his mid-twenties and on top of his game.”

Louis Smith didn’t have to travel to Denmark to record for the Danish-based label. It was Greenwich Grooving Time in NYC and the trumpeter was in the good company of tenor saxophonist Junior Cook (a Steeplechase recording artist in his own right), pianist Roland Hanna, bassist Sam Jones and drummer Billy Hart. They play a solid set of hard bop, mid-and up-tempo swingers that feature the flexible style and bright sounds of Smith and the typically half-lazy phrasing of the great Junior Cook, who found a nice spot in the jazz realm between the legendary stylings of Hank Mobley and Dexter Gordon.

The thing that hooked me though is Smith’s balladry on flugelhorn. He added a ballad or two on every one of his twelve Steeplechase records. Smith’s lovely buttery soft lyricism is all over his Chanson de Louise. Furthermore, Smith builds a beautiful seven-minute solo during I Can’t Get Started, the Gershwin/Duke standard that suffers from silly lyrics (“I’ve flown around the world in a plane/I’ve settled revolutions in Spain/The North Pole I have charted/But I can’t get started with you…”) but boast a beautiful melody and attractive chord changes. It has always been a perennial favorite of jazz musicians and singers.

The importance of the American Songbook for jazz – and how well jazz musicians recreated Tin Pan Alley in their own image – cannot be overestimated. Smith runs away with I Can’t Get Started here, a man of sorrow and resilience and more than a couple of emotional nuances in between. A gem, no less. Pleasurable result of browsing through the Steeplechase catalogue of records by what back then were acclaimed or unsung middle-aged jazz men.

Listen on YouTube to Prancin’, Chanson de Louise and I Can’t Get Started.