10 October : Green Is Beautiful

I have several Grant Green albums from his more straight-ahead jazz days. Like several other musicians of the time, he saw the market shift and turned to funk and a more commercial approach to put food on the table. Green Is Beautiful was his second foray into this territory, amidst predictable catcalls that he was ‘selling out’.

Green Is Beautiful was released in July 1970, but as with Lee Morgan’s The Sixth Sense, wasn’t reviewed in the UK until October 1970, when Richard Williams gave it a duff write-up in Melody Maker, using choice adjectives such as dire, pseudo-funk, offensive, unpleasant and cocktail guitar. Perversely, perhaps, I rather enjoyed it.

Where it scores is in musicians who know what they’re doing finding a groove and mining it for all it’s worth. This seems an obvious approach to James Brown’s Ain’t It Funky Now, which kicks off side one, less so with The Beatles’ A Day In The Life.

This is not innovatory, out-there jazz; is it dire, pseudo-funk, offensive, or unpleasant? No. It veers towards MoR in parts, but this would be a perfectly good album to spin while reading or working on something else.

I listened on Spotify. There doesn’t seem to be a formal playlist on YouTube, though all the tracks are there. I’ve linked to the opener, Ain’t It Funky Now below.