Grant Green Holy Barbarian Record?

[MattC]

Anyone know this record?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Holy-Barba.../dp/B0094GW8EC

Caught my eye yesterday at the Jazz Record Center in NYC. I held off on buying for now. If you know it, how is the sound quality? What's the playing like? Is he really playing a strat like in the photo?

[MattC]

Duh! I just realized I can listen to samples at the Amazon link. Anyway, still curious what others think who have heard the whole record.

[SamBooka]

doesnt ring a bell ... I will have to check it out.
He has a strat on the cover lol.

Strats dont get a lot of love here but having had one in regular rotation (retired my tele's for a while) I just cant get a nice jazz sound out of them

at 3:00 Doesnt sound anything like a strat to me

[PMB]

doesnt ring a bell ... I will have to check it out.
He has a strat on the cover lol.

Strats dont get a lot of love here but having had one in regular rotation (retired my tele's for a while) I just cant get a nice jazz sound out of them

at 3:00 Doesnt sound anything like a strat to me

Not really that different to the Strat tone Quentin Warren gets here @ 1'40":

[monkmiles]

Cool, would like to hear what Grant sounds like here. But not hearing much of Grant on the clips of the recording.

[Little Jay]

Doesn't sound like a Stratocaster to me either... but it could be a Strat. Although a picture on the cover with a Strat does not necessarily mean that a Strat was used, right?

[Little Jay]

Well I just ordered the album on Amazon UK. I'm a fan and have almost every other recording there is of Grant :-)

(I never really understand how Amazon works, the album costs £16,81 but in the small print they also offer it for £7,60..... So I got that and it's just the same CD. Dontgettit?!?)

[Little Jay]

to my ears it's clearly the strat. my guess is that grant got the ES 330 early 1960. the first picture with the 330 is from march 1960 afaik (the closing gig at the holy barbarian). one take from "holy barbarian" seems to be from february 1960 and still sounds like the strat.

That could well be. That would also mean that on the two '59 Jimmy Forrest albums (later released again as a Grant Green's "First Recordings") he would have played a Strat. He's pictured on that album with the 330, but that doesn't mean anything of course. Funny, I always assumed it was the 330 in those recordings as well, as the tone is not that different from that on his later 'official' albums.

[Little Jay]

That's a great discography, I have most of those recordings, but this oversight is very thorough, nice to have, thanks!

[edh]

Little Jay I believe you ordered the MP3 version and not the CD version.

[Little Jay]

Little Jay I believe you ordered the MP3 version and not the CD version.

I was afraid of that too, but nope, it says audio CD and it will be delivered as a package to my address....so I guess it's the CD.... It's from an external supplier apparently, "All Your Music" and is brand new. It comes from the USA where it's cheaper? This is what I don't really get from Amazon, but I've done it before: I can order the same product from Amazon USA but I would pay a lot of delivery costs, but Amazon UK will get the same product for me from the USA if I order thru them and pay only delivery from UK to the Netherlands, which is a lot cheaper plus the prices in the US are lower and I don't have to pay import fees.

[daveg]

you'll enjoy it. i like his quotes from the lee morgan/hank mobley nostalgia record. a few years later he would be playing with those guys.

i'm a huge fan and have collected everything from grant's discography Grant Green Discography except the joe carroll record:

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lBDYA7kCRw" target="_blank">

That whole album is on RDIO.

DG

[Little Jay]

to my ears it's clearly the strat. my guess is that grant got the ES 330 early 1960. the first picture with the 330 is from march 1960 afaik (the closing gig at the holy barbarian). one take from "holy barbarian" seems to be from february 1960 and still sounds like the strat.

My CD arrived this week (yup, only £7,60!) and in the booklet there's a picture of a recording session with Jimmy Forester with the ES-330 stating it was December 10, 1959. If that's accurate Grant would have possessed the ES-330 already for the Holy Barbarian recordings. Well, it's all speculation of course.

[edh]

@Jay, cool!!

[Greentone]

Seems like the 330, to me. But, you know, I have played plenty of solid-body guitars--Fenders, Gibsons, Hagstroms, etc.--with .12-.50 gauge flatwound strings on them, back in the 1960s and early 1970s. Guess what? They all sound a lot like the Holy Barbarian tone...if you play into an amp with a baxandall tone stack. That is, if you are using a _flat_ tone setup, you get a tone like the one you hear on the Green clip. Grant Green used to get that on Fender amps by cutting the bass and treble nearly off, leaving only the mid up. Interestingly, this is the most _flat_ setting on a Fender amp. It is comparable to, say, an Ampeg amp on 5,5,5 (bass, mid, treble).

A Stratocaster with thick, flats, neck pickup (lowered almost flush to the pickguard), into an old Ampeg Gemini I amp with bass=5, treble=5 will sound much like what you hear on the clip. That said, it would not surprise me if the recording was made with the ES-330 into either a Fender tweed Deluxe or an old Ampeg Rocket. Both were small, medium-power (12-watt) amps with a 12" speaker. Great amps for recording.

[wintermoon]

interesting observations. the reason i believe it is the strat are places like 7:02 or 7:49 of "there'll never be". the treble notes sound much thinner that the 330 usually does. 4:49 of "holy barbarian blues" also sounds soo stratish and not that much like p90s. i'd also expect the 330 to break up a little earlier in a live situation. it sure does on live at mintons, which admittedly was probably a much louder gig. but given the info that grant already had the 330 in 1959, a pic of the recording session with forrest and the fact that the guitar on the forrest session also sounds quite thin, it is more likely that i'm hearing this wrong.

now onto the next question does martino play his black les paul on the willis jackson recordings?

I think by Pat was still using his Les Paul in Jackson's band as I have a pic of him playing w/Jack McDuff and he's playing it--he joined McDuff after playing w/Jackson. he got his 175 when McDuff's band's bus was stolen and all equipment w/it.

[ingeneri]

Forget the guitar, notice how different Green's phrasing is on that Youtube clip. To me, it clearly puts to rest the complaints about his technique. Despite some signature licks, this is much more traditional bop phrasing and shows me how deliberate Green's later more famous rhythmic and bluesy approach was.

[AlsoRan]

..... he got his 175 when McDuff's band's bus was stolen and all equipment w/it.

Man! They were stealing buses of equipment back then, too? I thought that was more of a modern-day thing. Too bad....

[pkirk]

Forget the guitar, notice how different Green's phrasing is on that Youtube clip. To me, it clearly puts to rest the complaints about his technique. Despite some signature licks, this is much more traditional bop phrasing and shows me how deliberate Green's later more famous rhythmic and bluesy approach was.

Yeah, I've been working this one recently

and though he does use some of his clichés, he uses across the bar line/rhythmic displacement things, bebop lines, and is really clean given the fast tempo.
For me, there's nothing like transcribing and memorizing to see how profound a player is, and I'm in a grant green phase right now, and one thing I wasn't expecting is that his chops are a lot stronger than I realized before.

[mr. beaumont]

Just a little detective work, because I'm weird...

I think that cover might be shopped...A strat is a good 8-9 inches longer than a tenor sax, no?