Deep Green

Grant Green - Feelin' The Spirit plus 1 (1962) {Blue Note Japan, CP32-9527, Early Press, rel 1987}
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© 1962,1987 Blue Note / Toshiba EMI Japan | CP32-9527
Jazz / Hard Bop / Soul Jazz / Guitar

Soulful, spiritual work from guitarist Grant Green – an exploration of older tunes with a hip Blue Note 60s soul jazz approach! The album features Grant working in a quartet with Herbie Hancock, Billy Higgins, and Butch Warren – plus some added tambourine on a number of tracks – and the overall approach is extremely laidback and open, with Green soloing in a personal style that's a bit less frenetic than some of his other work of the period.

Broadening his musical palette, Grant Green detoured into a number of "theme" sessions in 1962 - the light Latin jazz of The Latin Bit; the country & western standards of Goin' West; and the best of the bunch, the old-time gospel album Feelin' the Spirit. For Feelin' the Spirit, Green takes five traditional, public-domain African-American spirituals (plus the CD bonus track "Deep River") and gives them convincing jazz treatments in a quartet-plus-tambourine setting. Green's light touch and clear tone match very well with the reverent material, and pianist Herbie Hancock is tremendous in support, serving the needs of the music and nailing the bright gospel style perfectly. Similarly, Green's playing never gets too complicated or loses sight of the melodies, yet he never runs short of ideas - which goes to show that Feelin' the Spirit is indeed a labor of love…

Grant Green - The Holy Barbarian, St. Louis, 1959 (2012) {Uptown Records UPCD 27.68 rec 1959-60}
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© 1959, 2012 Uptown Records | UPCD 27.68
Jazz / Hard Bop / Soul Jazz / Guitar / Organ

Grant Green's star rose after his signing to Blue Note in 1960, though he appeared as a sideman on several releases during the 1950s. These previously unissued live recordings, made in 1959 and 1960 at the Holy Barbarian Coffee House in St. Louis, document some of his earliest work. Although the music wasn't taped professionally, the sound is quite good, with several extended performances. The St. Louis native is joined by tenor saxophonist Bob Graf (a former Woody Herman sideman who had returned to his hometown), the somewhat obscure organist Sam Lazar, and drummer Chauncey Williams, though none of the three have very large discographies.

The Smithereens' excellent sophomore effort picks up where their debut, Especially for You, left off, with Pat DiNizio delivering another impressive batch of superbly constructed pop gems; tracks like "Only a Memory," "House We Used to Live In," and "Drown in My Own Tears" are immediately ingratiating – instantly familiar, yet performed with more than enough energy and flair to sound new and exciting…

Although it ironically coincided with the compact disc format's slow but inexorable march toward likely extinction, the third millennium's first decade witnessed an incredible boom in CD reissues of obscure ‘70s hard rock bands; bands whose careers quickly floundered or never even took off due to any number of reasons, like the subject of this review, London's Steel Mill. Like many of these commercially failed entities, Steel Mill made the fatal mistake of attempting to partake in the relatively isolated worlds of both progressive and heavy rock, instead of committing to just one or the other, and so their sole LP, 1972's Green Eyed God, fell through the cracks of consumer tastes and wasn't even released in the U.K. until 1975, three years after the group's demise. Be that as it may, few heavy prog bands favored such a dramatic clash between their artier musical pretensions and more visceral instrumental instincts than this London quintet, resulting in fascinatingly schizophrenic numbers boasting as much inner city grime and bluster as they do pastoral purity and whimsy…