Grant Green - We've Only Just Begun
I'm a little late because I couldn't sleep, but I'll smash this up here just under the midnight deadline in honor of a milestone birthday I just can't miss.
Today's b'day guy ought need no introductions at all, as he is one of the most shit-hot guitar players of this or any other lifetime.
Probably the guitarist most associated with Jazz Funk or Soul Jazz or whatever it's called this week, he brought the octave and eighth note styles of Wes Montgomery into the Soul Train line.
His late Sixties and Seventies LPs are biblical in their Funk Proportions. Many feature the legendary New Orleans native Idris Muhammad, laying down beats and grooves so filthy they are likely punishable by death in Wahabbi Islam.
Grant Green -- acknowledged alpha and omega of modern Soul Jazz guitar -- didn't live very long, and the record business had no hesitation in making sure his talents were always stalked by his addictions.
One label even started paying him in heroin, thinking they were cutting out the middleman.
He passed away all too young at just 43 of a heart attack after a gig, during a tour his doctors advised would kill him if he did it.
The most sampled guitarist in Hip-Hop history, his subtle influence will permeate the firmament as long as it's Funky.
Which will be forever, as long as there are humans to Bop Gun funkatize the galaxy anyways.
There aren't any ROIOs of Grant Green because, let's face it, he was mightily fucked up a lot of the time and was not, as a Jazz cat, being followed by The King Biscuit Flower Hour mobile truck everywhere he laid his case.
However, I do have this wild mixtape of him in my phone for decades, or at least as long as there have been these phone devices that have big storage for music, so I pulled it out and modified it to top out at a full 3CD, 4-hour funkfest for the benefit of the ears and hips of anyone unfortunate enough to never have heard this most electrifying axe wielder.
Grant Green
Walk In the Night
Grant Green's Greatest Grooves
1967-1979
01 Farid
02 Nighttime In the Switching Yard
03 We've Only Just Begun
04 Sookie Sookie
05 California Green
06 Mozart Symphony #40 In G Minor, K550, 1st Movement
07 The Main Attraction (edit)
08 The Final Comedown
09 Love On a Two Way Street
10 Patches
11 Traveling to Get to Doc
12 Vulcan Princess
13 I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up The Door, I'll Get It Myself)/Cold Sweat
14 Jan Jan
15 Iron City
16 Down Here On the Ground
17 High-Heel Sneakers (edit)
18 Ease Back
19 In the Middle
20 It's Your Thing
21 Future Feature
22 Let the Music Take Your Mind
23 Upshot
24 Hey Western Union Man
25 Walk In the Night
26 Never Can Say Goodbye
27 Battle Scene
28 Cease the Bombing
29 The Windjammer
30 One More Chance
31 Fancy Free (single edit remix)
32 Ain't It Funky Now
33 Flood In Franklin Park
Total time: 2:39:11
disc breaks go after Tracks 12 & 23
compendium of the guitar god's golden grooviest
selected, edited, sequenced, remuxed & remastered by EN, June 2025
1.37 GB FLAC/direct link
As per usual, I constructed a few unique edits and even used the AI stemsplit thingy to create a previously-nonexistent remix of one of GG's signature cover tunes, which features a frenetically melodious guitar solo that's had lesser players tossing their instruments off rooftops in pure frustration ever since he played it.
But then, the very toppermost musical practitioners are the rare birds that can do just that: to wring profound and direct emotional results out of technical mastery, as Grant Green -- born this day in 1935 and gone way too soon from the physical world -- was born to do.--J.
6.6.1935 - 1.31.1979