Grant Green Club Mozambique UK release

[Ragu]

Is this going to be in the mediocre boogaloo vein of "Alive" and "Lighthouse?" Will Grant's performance at Mozambique find him soloing over chord changes--or just endlessly repetitive one chord vamps?

God, I hope so.

[CJ Shearn]

excellent post as always MG! You are the soul jazz champ of these boards . I have avoided GG at the Lighthouse but now maybe I will check it out prior to the Mozambique record.

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

speaking of 70s grant- will BN ever reissue all the other titles. i know there are quite a few. i would of picked em up my now if ive seen them. Carryin' on is one i know- never ever seen it in the store. can someone list all his albums for me from like 1968 on?

PS i agree w/ u about the intensity of lighthouse- its not just funk but its THE funk. grant not only excelled in jazz but he excelled in funk. thats why i have twice the respect for him, just like i do w/ donald byrd

[ep1str0phy]

Is this going to be in the mediocre boogaloo vein of "Alive" and "Lighthouse?" Will Grant's performance at Mozambique find him soloing over chord changes--or just endlessly repetitive one chord vamps? Has anyone heard a boot of this material so far?

They weren't mediochre boogaloo albums; they were MFin' GREAT boogaloo albums. And YES ! I'm damn sure it's going to be in that vein. Looking forward to it greatly, thanks.

MG

For those familiar with the material--how do the Mozambique sides stack up? As far as I'm concerned, the Green of this period oscillates between insipid and utterly galvanizing. A big fan of Alive! and a sort-of fan of Lighthouse (some of those compositions--if not performances--leave me cold). But yeah, for what they are, they're the best).

Not bad on the cover art, BTW.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Soul Jazz, right from the start in the '40s, had the same objective as R&B - entertainment for black adults. So, as R&B changed, Soul Jazz changed in parallel. The most important people to develop R&B in the period between the mid fifties and mid sixties were Soul Jazz musicians anyway - Ray Charles and James Brown.

Please identify the specific bands/records which identified "soul jazz ... right from the start in the '40s".

The early leaders were mainly tenor players: Illinois Jacquet, without whom there would have been no honkers; Gene Ammons; Ammons/Stitt (though half or maybe more of Stitt's career is Bebop); Arnett Cobb; Ike Quebec; Big Jay McNeely; Paul Williams; Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson; Hal "Cornbread" Singer; Wild Bill Moore; Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis (first tenor/organ records in '49). Other big names included Tiny Grimes & his Rockin' Highlanders. Among vocalists, Dinah was the Queen. In the early '50s, there was Wild Bill Davis and other pre-Smith organists like Milt Buckner & Bill Doggett.

MG

[monkboughtlunch]

Is this going to be in the mediocre boogaloo vein of "Alive" and "Lighthouse?" Will Grant's performance at Mozambique find him soloing over chord changes--or just endlessly repetitive one chord vamps? Has anyone heard a boot of this material so far?

They weren't mediochre boogaloo albums; they were MFin' GREAT boogaloo albums. And YES ! I'm damn sure it's going to be in that vein. Looking forward to it greatly, thanks.

MG

Live at the Lighthouse is unsurpassed for intensity. The atmosphere captured on that recording is unbelievable IMHO.....and I love all Grant's music. matter of fact I think my favourite Grant Green period is the one from about 1959-1979. Thanks for the link. Looks like they've managed to represent all the tracks except the one called Glenda. I'm sure this session will have it's own unique vibe just like Alive and Lighthouse are both different. I think the presence of Houston Person on this will make it even more so. Also no Claude Bartee.

No rub intended against Grant. I just think much of his commerical / boogaloo output during this period 1969-1979 was below his abilities. The presence of Houston Person on this Mozambique date looks promising--as he is an amazing soul-jazz saxophonist. But I suspect this is more of the same "Alive" type material.

But being a big Green fan, I will probably pick this up for a listen. Any new Green on CD is cause for celebration. But I prefer his blues/soul jazz and straight ahead period 1959-1966. I wish they would also release more of the rejected vault material from that period, as all of his early Blue Note Lps have been reissued.

Having found out about the other two Verve sessions only very recently via jazzdisco I guess they would be the ones I would perhaps want to hear above all others. To find out from posts here that it appears they no longer exist is a real 'soul jazz' heartbreaker. So I guess I'll saviour Club Mozambique even more because of that. Anyway it'll be great to be able to read here how people respond to their first hearings of this historic session.

Who says the 2 1965 unissued Verve dates don't exist?

[Dan Gould]

Soul Jazz, right from the start in the '40s, had the same objective as R&B - entertainment for black adults. So, as R&B changed, Soul Jazz changed in parallel. The most important people to develop R&B in the period between the mid fifties and mid sixties were Soul Jazz musicians anyway - Ray Charles and James Brown.

Please identify the specific bands/records which identified "soul jazz ... right from the start in the '40s".

The early leaders were mainly tenor players: Illinois Jacquet, without whom there would have been no honkers; Gene Ammons; Ammons/Stitt (though half or maybe more of Stitt's career is Bebop); Arnett Cobb; Ike Quebec; Big Jay McNeely; Paul Williams; Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson; Hal "Cornbread" Singer; Wild Bill Moore; Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis (first tenor/organ records in '49). Other big names included Tiny Grimes & his Rockin' Highlanders. Among vocalists, Dinah was the Queen. In the early '50s, there was Wild Bill Davis and other pre-Smith organists like Milt Buckner & Bill Doggett.

MG

None of these people played "soul jazz" as the term is used.

I'm not at all disputing that there is a continuum from those you mention to soul jazz as the term has been applied (by everyone I know save yourself). You might want to call those folks "pre-soul jazz".

[Soul Stream]

I heard this whole session about a month ago when I was in NYC. To answer the question, yes it is Grant and band performing music in even tighter arrangements that the Lighthouse tapes. Grant soloing on pop songs of the day, boogaloos, ect....

And yes, I can't wait...

Not the best Grant Green in that vein. For that I'd take the Lighthouse. However, it's better than Alive imho in sound quality and performance I'd say. Although I'm sure that's arguable.

Great stuff. I loved hearing it and the treatment Grant gives of "More Today Than Yesterday" is quite surprising. Grant put lots of thought and work into what songs to record and the arrangements on this recording. You might not like the route he takes. But as a working band for the times, it represents club performance as it was and done as well as it could be at clubs like the Mozambique I would guess.

[monkboughtlunch]

thanks--regarding sound quality, did they ever find the masters? is it stereo or mono?

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

u mean u just go 2 blue note and youre tight w/ them and they let u listen to master tapes??? did u listen to a copy there or the actual reel

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Soul Jazz, right from the start in the '40s, had the same objective as R&B - entertainment for black adults. So, as R&B changed, Soul Jazz changed in parallel. The most important people to develop R&B in the period between the mid fifties and mid sixties were Soul Jazz musicians anyway - Ray Charles and James Brown.

Please identify the specific bands/records which identified "soul jazz ... right from the start in the '40s".

The early leaders were mainly tenor players: Illinois Jacquet, without whom there would have been no honkers; Gene Ammons; Ammons/Stitt (though half or maybe more of Stitt's career is Bebop); Arnett Cobb; Ike Quebec; Big Jay McNeely; Paul Williams; Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson; Hal "Cornbread" Singer; Wild Bill Moore; Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis (first tenor/organ records in '49). Other big names included Tiny Grimes & his Rockin' Highlanders. Among vocalists, Dinah was the Queen. In the early '50s, there was Wild Bill Davis and other pre-Smith organists like Milt Buckner & Bill Doggett.

MG

None of these people played "soul jazz" as the term is used.

I'm not at all disputing that there is a continuum from those you mention to soul jazz as the term has been applied (by everyone I know save yourself). You might want to call those folks "pre-soul jazz".

This is also the view of Bob Porter, a man whose views on this subject are not to be sneezed at, I reckon.

MG

[Dan Gould]

Soul Jazz, right from the start in the '40s, had the same objective as R&B - entertainment for black adults. So, as R&B changed, Soul Jazz changed in parallel. The most important people to develop R&B in the period between the mid fifties and mid sixties were Soul Jazz musicians anyway - Ray Charles and James Brown.

Please identify the specific bands/records which identified "soul jazz ... right from the start in the '40s".

The early leaders were mainly tenor players: Illinois Jacquet, without whom there would have been no honkers; Gene Ammons; Ammons/Stitt (though half or maybe more of Stitt's career is Bebop); Arnett Cobb; Ike Quebec; Big Jay McNeely; Paul Williams; Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson; Hal "Cornbread" Singer; Wild Bill Moore; Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis (first tenor/organ records in '49). Other big names included Tiny Grimes & his Rockin' Highlanders. Among vocalists, Dinah was the Queen. In the early '50s, there was Wild Bill Davis and other pre-Smith organists like Milt Buckner & Bill Doggett.

MG

None of these people played "soul jazz" as the term is used.

I'm not at all disputing that there is a continuum from those you mention to soul jazz as the term has been applied (by everyone I know save yourself). You might want to call those folks "pre-soul jazz".

This is also the view of Bob Porter, a man whose views on this subject are not to be sneezed at, I reckon.

MG

I presume you mean that Bob Porter calls 40s R&B "soul jazz".

Does this mean that everyone else doesn't count? The simple fact is that "soul jazz" was recognized and identified as such in the late 50s-early 60s. That does not mean that we go back to its antecedents and rename plain old R&B "soul jazz".

[Dan Gould]

Or maybe we should go back and call Parker's music "hard bop".

After all, it was bop, and at those tempos, it was damn hard to play.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Soul Jazz, right from the start in the '40s, had the same objective as R&B - entertainment for black adults. So, as R&B changed, Soul Jazz changed in parallel. The most important people to develop R&B in the period between the mid fifties and mid sixties were Soul Jazz musicians anyway - Ray Charles and James Brown.

Please identify the specific bands/records which identified "soul jazz ... right from the start in the '40s".

The early leaders were mainly tenor players: Illinois Jacquet, without whom there would have been no honkers; Gene Ammons; Ammons/Stitt (though half or maybe more of Stitt's career is Bebop); Arnett Cobb; Ike Quebec; Big Jay McNeely; Paul Williams; Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson; Hal "Cornbread" Singer; Wild Bill Moore; Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis (first tenor/organ records in '49). Other big names included Tiny Grimes & his Rockin' Highlanders. Among vocalists, Dinah was the Queen. In the early '50s, there was Wild Bill Davis and other pre-Smith organists like Milt Buckner & Bill Doggett.

MG

None of these people played "soul jazz" as the term is used.

I'm not at all disputing that there is a continuum from those you mention to soul jazz as the term has been applied (by everyone I know save yourself). You might want to call those folks "pre-soul jazz".

This is also the view of Bob Porter, a man whose views on this subject are not to be sneezed at, I reckon.

MG

I presume you mean that Bob Porter calls 40s R&B "soul jazz".

Does this mean that everyone else doesn't count? The simple fact is that "soul jazz" was recognized and identified as such in the late 50s-early 60s. That does not mean that we go back to its antecedents and rename plain old R&B "soul jazz".

I think it's very difficult to call the recordings of those musicians R&B. That would place them with Professor Longhair, Charles Brown, Amos Milburn etc, which doesn't seem to work for me - and I doubt that it would work for you, either. Certainly, they shared the objective of R&B, and it's also true that the boundary (if that's the right word) between the two groups of musicians was permeable (much more so in the forties than later), but they were nonetheless jazz musicians who were playing jazz.

I think the key point is that there WAS a continuum, as you've so rightly said. The '60s and '70s recordings made by the musicians I mentioned in my earlier post - those that lasted that long, anyway - are clearly Soul Jazz, and I hope you'd agree. But these later recordings show both that the men were playing essentially the same music and that their objective in doing so was the same.

To me, the point in time when a kind of music is generally recognised and identified is an important historical point only in terms of the critical appreciation/marketing of the music. That is, of course, not a negligible matter when dealing with commercial music. But it's frequently the case that those who make such distinctions stick are behind the general public and the musicians themselves. A good, and related, example is the recognition and identification of R&B, which occurred in 1949; a fair while after R&B developed. (And there were, of course, extraneous reasons why this identification was needed more quickly than that for Soul Jazz.)

Further, it seems to me that the development of Soul Jazz can only be seen coherently in its whole development up to the Smooth Jazz of the present day if one looks at the music right from its origins in the forties, and traces its parallel development with R&B.

MG

[Shawn]

Is this going to be in the mediocre boogaloo vein of "Alive" and "Lighthouse?" Will Grant's performance at Mozambique find him soloing over chord changes--or just endlessly repetitive one chord vamps?

God, I hope so.

Agreed!

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

These are the tracks confirmed by MC himself:

January 6, 1971

Set #1

Patches CD 00946 3 63522 20

Set #2

Bottom of the barrel-1 CD 00946 363522 20

January 7, 1971

Set #1:

One more chance-1 CD 00946 3 63522 20

Set #2:

I am somebody CD 00946 3 63522 20

Set #3

Walk on by CD 00946 3 63522 20

So apparently, "More today than yesterday" isn't being released. After reading what SoulStream said about that, I'm devastated.

MG

[monkboughtlunch]

Tracklisting from walmart site:

1. Jan Jan

2. Farid

3. Bottom Of The Barrel

4. Walk On By

5. More Today Than Yesterday

6. One More Chance

7. Patches

8. I Am Somebody

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Tracklisting from walmart site:

1. Jan Jan

2. Farid

3. Bottom Of The Barrel

4. Walk On By

5. More Today Than Yesterday

6. One More Chance

7. Patches

8. I Am Somebody

Ahhhhh! Gawd blesher Guv!

MG

[Bluerein]

It's from mono tapes........ I must have misread the file MC sent me (it was kinda scrambled on my computer). Luckily there was room for more tracks.

[Soul Stream]

Wow, this is a drag. From my recollection, there were 12 or so tracks...maybe more. However, it was all on one CD so I could be wrong I guess. It was late and I was a little drunk. . I hope I'm wrong. I do remember Jan Jan, More Today and Walk on By. And others I didn't recognize. Anyway, great stuff I'm looking forward to!

[monkboughtlunch]

Can't remember if this has been posted here or not, but there is a small clip of video of Grant in 1969 here:

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

is this the other cliip that was talked about or is this grant doin his funky stuff

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

is this the other cliip that was talked about or is this grant doin his funky stuff

This is the clip from Jazz Expo '69 in London that was posted on another thread a few days ago. It seems to be the only bit of GG video in existence.

(Will someone please give me idiot-proof instructions on how to link one thread to another?)

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Well, I got it and, apart from the sleeve design, it's a mother.

Grant's playing is, as we've come to expect, wonderful. In this session, you can see that Ronnie Foster has made considerable strides since the Cliche Lounge album "Alive". His solos seem to flow better and be more telling, somehow. Clarence Thomas, whose only other recordings I know are the Idris Muhammad Prestiges, shows that, for someone who recorded so little, he has a VOICE! And, of course, Houston and Idris are great, too.

SoulStream mentioned the care GG had obviously taken with the arrangements. I echo that. The arrangement and treatment of "More today than yesterday" are completely different from Charles Earland's; "Black talk" was still on the R&B and Pop album charts when this session took place, so this was a real departure. And the way GG voiced the horns on "Patches" reminded me greatly of George Braith. In a sense, that can stand for the entire album - it's as funky as hell but there are all these extremely interesting things going on.

The sound is good, I think. All I could say against it is that Idris seems to be a mite loud and GG a trifle quiet. But, under the circumstances, that's scarcely an objection. I think, actually, having it in mono is pretty good, because it emphasises the superb melding together of the horns.

Bob Belden has done a good sleeve note. In it, he refers to "Jan Jan" as being by "the mysterious M Davis (not Miles Davis)". Of course not! It's by Moses "Mad Professor" Davis. This seems to me to indicate that Blue Note doesn't know who to send the royalties for this composition to. (I'm starting a thread on Moses; an organist everyone here should know. And maybe someone DOES know him. There's a specific injustice going on here, it seems.)

MG

[Aftab]

sweet - gettin it tomorrow