Grant Green: Alive! (Blue Note 80 series) [BLUE NOTE]

Why you'll love it

This Blue Note 80 series edition presses the original stereo album on 180g vinyl. AllMusic called it the hardest funk LP of Green's later career and the best place to start with his 1970s work.

This edition

• Blue Note 80 series
• 180g vinyl
• Stereo
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Grant Green spent the 1960s as one of Blue Note's busiest guitarists, but it took until August 15, 1970, for the label to capture him where he really lived: on a club stage. Alive! was his first official live recording, cut at the Cliché Lounge in Newark, New Jersey, with Francis Wolff producing.

By then Green had swapped hard bop for long, greasy funk workouts, and this band was built for it. Idris Muhammad lays down the drums, Joseph Armstrong adds congas, Willie Bivens plays vibes, and Ronnie Foster and Neal Creque share the organ bench, with tenor saxophone on top. "Let the Music Take Your Mind" turns a Kool & the Gang tune into nearly nine minutes of groove, Creque's "Time to Remember" stretches past eleven, and Don Covay and Steve Cropper's "Sookie, Sookie" gets the full Newark treatment. "Down Here on the Ground," by Lalo Schifrin and Gale Garnett, closes things on a soulful, slow-burning note, and Green's single-note lines ring out over all of it.

Acid jazz fans and beat makers have been mining records like this one for decades, and the Penguin Guide to Jazz described the club as burning and sweaty. We can't supply the August humidity, but turn it up and open a window.

Also at Kops: more Grant Green on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Blue Note (cat# 84360), a reissue of the 1970 live album.