A prolific star of
the Blue Note label Grant Green died
at the age of forty-three, victim of
a heart attack induced by the familiarly
depressing cocktail of hard drugs, erratic
eating habits and fitful neglect. Sharony
Andrews Green, his daughter-in-law,
has compiled what I’d call less a biography
than an oral testimony, a kind of journalistic
reportage. It draws on the recollections
of a number of associates, colleagues
and friends as well as the memories
of Green’s son. The bias of the book
is one of active reclamation of Green’s
memory and influence in the light of
its alleged influence on the contemporary
scene (there’s a less than enthralling
diversion on the London dance scene
in the 1980s which sampled some of Green’s
music). Sharony Andrews Green has enlisted
others to focus on the specifics of
the music making whilst she seems far
less comfortable with jazz and far more
so with the posthumous life of Green’s
music in a few acid house tracks.
Inevitably weaving
herself into the text – as the wife
of Green’s son Grant Green Jr – gives
the book a sense of intimacy but the
degree of immediacy is tempered by the
relative paucity of hard facts. Green’s
life was, musically and in other ways,
one of unceasing movement. He seems
to have taken on jobs regardless and
the fact that, once he had emerged into
the limelight, he recorded a staggering
seventeen albums in his first Blue Note
year, 1961, speaks pretty much for itself.
Nevertheless some details emerge well;
some of Green’s early years and influences
are well, if succinctly, covered; the
importance of organist Jimmy Smith can’t
be overstated, the place of drugs and
the Muslim faith in his and others lives
are made forcibly apparent. There is
some analysis of some of Green’s albums
by Swiss critic Tobias Jundt and these
provide the kind of critical insight
frequently submerged in the main body
of the text by slang and demotic.
The text is at best
serviceable; quotations abound and are
made to do the work a biographer should
do; the narrative is as a result a losing
compromise between the tape recorded
interview and linking passages. But
admirers of Green will find useful things
here, amidst the journalistic cuttings
and the unedited transcripts, though
they will have to work hard at it. As
an act of homage to the father-in-law
she never knew it seems to represent
a kind of quest for the author. Others
will exercise more caution.
Jonathan Woolf
