Great Players Benny Green

[mark_addy]

This afternoon I became aware of a couple of things - this series of threads on players, but more importantly the subject-I-have-chosen's liner notes on a Zoot Sims LP I picked up cheap in a record shop while down South visiting my Dad. Apparently Green provided notes for a lot of releases on 'Pablo' - I have a couple, a nice Sarah Vaughn one I bought years ago, and the current 'Zoot Sims meets Jimmy Rowles'. Sims aside, what this really did was remind me what an amazing writer and jazz historian Green was. I don't know anything at all about his playing, because by the time I became aware of him (at home, Sunday lunchtimes on BBC R2 through the 80s) it was in his writing and presenting role that he really drew me in. He seemed to know everything there was to know about the 'great American song book' and to have met most of its authors and performers, as well as possessing a colossal stack of anecdotes, and seeming able to remember them. Before the internet made people think that kind of thing was possible for mere mortals.

I never made it past the kind of music he used to play - songs from the shows, jazz greats of the 40s and 50s - and I am still trying to get less bad at playing it. I thought it might be nice to share this memory of him, if anyone else enjoys this kind of thing. If anyone is interested I'll type out a couple of his more acerbic observations.

 

[rhysonsax]

Top writer and a great enthusiast for jazz and cricket, so a double win for me.

Rhys

 

[Vlad]

Benny Green came across as a really nice decent bloke as I remember him on various TV programs he presented, and all his radio stuff of course. The only footage of him playing I've seen was in the cheesy pop malarkey of 'Lord Rockingham's 11 ' who had a hit with the comic 'Hoots Mon'. They were a kind of house backing band for the TV show 'Oh Boy!'
There's some YT footage of that with Benny on baritone wearing dark glasses !
He even wrote a couple of semi autobiographical novels which are very amusing, centered around being a jobbing player in dance bands. The novels aren't easy to find but worth a read.
He was great mates with Ronnie Scott, played in his bigger band projects and was involved with him when starting up the Soho jazz club business.

 

[rhysonsax]

And his son, Leo Green, is a wonderful tenor saxophone player who has performed with Jools Holland, Van Morrison and many more.

View: https://youtu.be/ZLpK9ZylVlQ?si=h2I4lSKI4piZM-ej


Rhys

 

[mark_addy]

Well, taking my own medicine, I have bought a few of Green's books - cheap on ebay, forgotten talent that he is. I am now on the Lester Young chapter of 'The Reluctant Art', a nearly free 1961 'Jazz Book Club Production' in its yellowing paper dust jacket which smells just like it should. (The book is also available in a slightly different form as the last bit of the collected volume of Green's jazz writing 'Such Sweet Thunder' - which I also picked up cheap on ebay). This is obvious, but it's the first time I have done it - read a book of criticism with a laptop on your knees, and when he says '...'Dickie's Dream' is a tour de force in the use of the minor sixth chord to evoke spectral sentiments and create melodic shapes quite new to jazz' (for example) - there it is on youtube, with all of two comments under from a couple of equally strange listeners who can still be bothered with all this old stuff. But what an opportunity, and what a free record library the interweb represents.

I need a book to help me into it, or all I am left with, faced with potentially the whole of catalogue of recorded music in its entirety is 'what the **** will I listen to now?'. Those records I mentioned in my first post are one way to get over that, and this is another.

 

[mark_addy]

Coming back to Benny Green - I have just finished reading 'Words and Music', a biography by his son Dominic. It's a lovely book - he writes in his Dad's style (which is good - Green Snr is such a good writer that if his son had been noticeably poorer or used a very different feel, then the quotes (and these are a good proportion of the book) and the text would have jarred) and they clearly thought very highly of each other. For anyone wanting to read great humour about the life of a poor family in vanished inner-city London, early British Jazz, the Ronnie Scott Orchestra (9 piece from the early-mid 50s) - it's just great.

Knowing now more about who BG played with, I wanted to hear him - but this is more tricky than it might be, as he is credited on recordings but is never the main attraction. I ended up with a (cheap - of course) box set of four CD recordings called 'Boppin' with Scott' released by 'Proper Records' - attractive to me because they also issued the (even cheaper) box set of Fats Navarro recordings I bought a little while ago while going down a Tad Dameron rabbit hole - and that one came with a booklet which was like full-on liner notes, and then some. I was going to need that, to work out which tracks BG appeared on.

Writing liner notes _on_ Green, as the booklet which comes with 'Boppin' with Scott' does from time to time, must have a felt a bit daunting - he being the guy who, I mentioned in my OP, wrote loads and loads of notes for Norman Granz's 'Pablo' recordings. But here he is, soloing at some length on some early numbers by the Orchestra. Green apparently thought he was not as good as the rest of the band - and here, compared to contemporaneous recordings with Harry Klein taking the baritone part, that sounds like sober self-assessment - though he can still play wonderfully. But Klein apparently had the ****s when Stan Kenton needed a bari player in the UK, so Benny got to do it. This is just the kind of detail BG used to chat about every week on Radio 2. Before the internet, it is remarkable to consider where he got, and kept, the treasure trove of anecdote which I used to enjoy listening to so much.