Friday jazz profile: Grant Green, and understanding the basics

 Looking at what I have posted so far in the revamped series, I think I want to take a step even further back today.  Last week, I put up a performance by Lenny Breau, and commentary on him, but in the context of previous discussions of Tigran Hamasyan and Pierre Dørge, perhaps today I'll write about something even more fundamental to jazz.  Obviously, there is no order or coherence to this series.  Today, let's have an examination of Grant Green.

Jazz can be complex to the point of mystifying.  Today, the opposite.  Few jazz musicians who arose after the bebop revolution were more closely tied to the rudiments of blues than Grant Green, and few more aptly demonstrated the principle espoused by Miles Davis that what matters are the notes you don't play.  So let's examine his classic, "Idle Moments."

Listen to a few elements.  This is a classic in simplicity.  In contrast to Hamasyan, the time is remarkably consistent.  In contrast to the elaborate picking of Breau, Grant plays linearly.  Single-note leads, straight blues.  What Grant does is set up something very different from the image of jazz as abstruse incomprehensibility.  Instead, it is a mood piece.  So as you listen, notice the consistency of the rhythm, and how both Green's clean guitar lines, along with Bobby Hutcherson's vibraphone and Joe Henderson's sax leave space, and notes between, only really filled with the occasional elaboration by Duke Pearson's piano.  He's the only show-off.

So what makes this "jazz?"  What separates this from blues?  Listen.

To return to the wisdom of Miles Davis, it's all about the notes you don't play.  So think about those spaces between the notes.  The consistency of those spaces.  The pauses.  In some music, the spaces imply notes.  In other music, the spaces and implications create tension.  With "Idle Moments," it is the latter.  That makes the piece easier to grasp, and an entry point for this style of jazz.  A blues guitarist would fill those spaces with notes.  B.B. King, tackling a piece like this, would fill those spaces with heavy vibrato.  The Texas players and their sharper tones would be too heavy.  Albert Collins couldn't tone it down if he tried.  With Grant Green, though, the consistency of the spaces between, and the notes he didn't play create the music.  No counting exercises, no trickery, just listening to what is implied.  That's jazz.