Green's Blues

If I could give this album six stars I would. This is a wonderful demonstration of rich jazz piano solo playing that pulls the greatest qualities out of one of the most magnificent instruments on the planet -- the big beautiful concert grand piano!

Im a big fan of Bennie Green's playing. If you enjoy excellent soulful playing, this is the place.

Excellent recording in DSD

This CD is remarkable. If you enjoy solo piano and have an ear for some of the old jazz tunes, this CD will please you.

Playing exposed without a rhythm section is the ultimate challenge for an improvising soloist. Nonetheless, in the early decades of jazz, players such as Earl Hines, Fats Waller, and Art Tatum established daunting standards, in terms of virtuosity, touch, swing, blues feeling, rhythmic displacement, melodic variation, harmonic richness, improvisational ingenuity, etc. There are only a small number of classics of the solo piano genre in the era of the long-playing record and the CD, in part because sustaining solo invention and variety for 40+ minutes is amazingly difficult. 1968 was for me the watershed year, with arguably the two finest contributions ever to this genre: Bill Evans's "Alone" and Oscar Peterson's "My Favorite Instrument." Since then, my own short list of outstanding solo jazz piano albums includes Peterson's "Tracks," Earl Hines' "Tour de Force," Evans's "Alone (Again)," Hank Jones' "Solo Piano," McCoy Tyner's "Revelations" and "Soliloquy," Roland Hanna's "Duke Ellington Piano Solos," and Marcus Roberts's "Alone with Three Giants." Others might like to add one or more of Keith Jarrett's rhapsodic outings or something by Dave McKenna or Brad Mehldau's "Elegiac Cycle" or . . . Hey, make your own lists!To my list I've added "Green's Blues."Benny Green, for some unfathomable reason, remains an underrated player (a number of his excellent Blue Note recordings, for instance, have gone out of print, which is a crime given the garbage that remains in print). No doubt the simplistic notion that Green is "merely" an Oscar Peterson clone has done his reputation damage. But given that Oscar could do it all, that's hardly an insult. Anyone who knows both players well, however, can easily hear the difference. Green's style, for instance, is more consistently funky, demonstrating his debt to other sources, such as players like Wynton Kelly and Bobby Timmons. What Peterson and Green do have in common is mainly sovereign command of their instrument, the whole encyclopedia of jazz styles at their fingertips, and an inspired knack for tight melodic playing and for swinging hard and persuasively.On "Green's Blues," Green combines stride, swing, and post-bop styles, making for an album that is terrifically joyful and (God forbid!) entertaining. Green's playing occurs in that rare zone where there is no contradiction at all between art and entertainment. You can listen to this album a thousand times with a smile on your face, because Green isn't afraid to make his music sound good--but there is no way you can call playing on this transcendental level some kind of a sell-out. Green doesn't please the musty critics who think that recycling atonal chord clusters from the mid-sixties makes a guy an "innovator." No, Green is a different kind of "post-modern" stylist, one who feels free to draw upon what he sees as the best that the tradition has to offer and to make that into something that's his own.Green isn't as "intellectual" or "cool" or "subtle" a player as, say, a brilliant contemporary like Brad Mehldau, who has closer affinities to Bill Evans's style. But there are complementary strengths in Green's more vigorous, muscular, extroverted approach, forged from the venerable traditions of stride, swing, and soul jazz and refined by the touch of a classically-trained player. (Interestingly enough, Mehldau and Bill Charlap, whom I take to be Green's finest contemporaries, are also classically trained.)The fact is, there is so much liveliness, humor, and sheer instrumental panache here that this album cannot help but be an inspiration. There are also all sorts of wonderful and unexpected little touches, like the way Green strums the piano strings near the beginning of "Just You, Just Me" and uses Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time" for the coda of a truly great rendition of Duke Ellington's classic "It Don't Mean a Thing" (which also uses Gershwin's "It Ain't Necessarily So" as a bridge--talk about being "alone with three giants" . . .). Hey, discover the abundant pleasures of this album for yourself!

Benny Green is usually a relatively 'busy' player at the piano as demonstrated on the majority of his previous albums, however I disagree with the last review stating that this disc represents nothing more than a showoff. This album shows Green's command over the keyboard, in particular often exercising his stride technique. An inspired rendition of It Dont Mean A Thing is a highlight for me and I can honestly recommend this disc to any jazz lover - especially those who dig Green already.

Benny Green is an amazing pianist. His time is perfect and his technique is superb. He swings harder than any pianist today. Dig his dynamics.

Hailed as the next coming of Oscar Peterson (as if that were an honor)(with whom he recorded a duet album), Benny Green is a technically gifted pianist who (like Oscar P) cannot seem to resist showing off and "entertaining". Although known for his blues and gospel/Horace Silver/Hamp Hawes influence, I think the Peterson disease is stronger.