Plucked from Obscurity

The “hapax legomenon,” as classicists among us know, is a word that appears only once in a language’s (or an author’s) texts. If Google video is the closest thing we’ve got to the great Alexandrian video library, there are worthies who turn up only a single, precious visual record, a “hapax phenomenon”; one such treasure is the clip above, the only one, it seems, that features the great jazz guitarist Grant Green (1935-1979), from 1969. (And this clip puts it into context.) The era’s other great jazz guitarist, Wes Montgomery (1923-1968), is seen on many videos (as here) because he was featured on television during his European tour of 1965. Montgomery has the more original, rounded tone (due to his thumb-plucking technique); Green’s tone, with the pick, is closer to the classic, pointed jazz-guitar sound of Charlie Christian—but, when push comes to shove, I listen more often to Green, who, to my ear, dances a little more abstractly over the harmonies. (But I’d like to hear from the experts.) He was a member of one of the great trios of the mid-sixties (with the organist Larry Young and the drummer Elvin Jones), of which, sadly, there’s no video record; he recorded copiously (for Blue Note) in the ‘sixties; among his greatest recordings are “Standards,” “Matador,” and “The Complete Quartets with Sonny Clark“.

P.S. Extraordinary footage—perhaps another hapax—of Larry Young, here with Tony Williams, from 1971.