Chris Greene Quartet
The recording of Conversance is yet another milestone for celebrated Chicagoan saxophonist Chris Greene: It’s his first album for Pravda Records, Chicago’s longest-running indie rock label, which in its 40 years has never released a jazz recording before. “I’m really excited to be the first,” Greene says. The album is being released on 12” LP vinyl, CD, digital download and via streaming platforms October 19. https://orcd.co/9jblqox
In Greene and company, the label has a group that was voted best jazz band in Chicago twice in polls by the alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader and a fan friendly artist with strong ties to the community. He recently received the Mayor’s Award for the Arts via the Evanston Arts Council. “This means a lot just because it’s my hometown, these are people that I literally interact with just about every single day,” he said in accepting the award.
Along with a pair of fairly recent Pravda signees with whom he has played, singer-songwriters Steve Dawson and Nora O’Connor, he is helping boost the company’s reputation even as it boosts his. Other artists with whom he has performed include Common, the Temptations, Poi Dog Pondering, Liquid Soul and Andrew Bird.
For saxophonist Chris Greene, turning 50 was a double milestone. It inspired him to look back on his career and the strides he has made as an independent jazz artist. It also inspired him to reflect on his life as a husband, father and family man. Little did he know how happily those two worlds would collide.
Greene was working at home on music for Conversance, when his attentive 12-year-old son Alex, a talented pianist and drummer and major Star Wars fan, played a melody for him inspired by one of the tunes his old man was playing. The elder Greene liked it so much, he decided to use it as the A section of the song, a six-measure blues in 6/4 time with a bridge. “It was a perfect fit,” he says. “It really made the tune.” He titled the tune “The Emperor Strikes Back.”
Even by Greene’s high-risk standards (AllAboutJazz called him “a post-bop maverick intent on shaking things up for the mainstream”), the new album is an unpredictable delight. His treatment here of the oft-recorded jazz classic, “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” takes it into new, uncharted territory. Greene layers the melody over a groove borrowed from Curtis Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love” from the Superfly soundtrack. It’s a great mash up.
“Gentleman’s Breakfast,” a sonorous Greene original, is a “quick samba” inspired by Brazilian singers Ed Motta (with whom he has performed) and Elis Regina. Bassist Marc Piane joins the freewheeling party with his piece “Thumper,” a “crazy shit’s gonna happen type of song” that includes element of Frank Zappa and King Crimson. Conversance also features “Broken Glass,” a great vehicle by and for Espinosa (“a great student of piano styles”), Piane’s low-key “Inspiration” (the romantic flip side of “Thumper”) and a bumptious reading of Duke Ellington’s “Just Squeeze Me.” Says Greene, “It dawned on me only recently that a lot of my albums have a Duke Ellington or Billy Strayhorn song on them,” he says. “They’re always in my thoughts.”
Like Duke, Greene writes with specific players in his close-knit band (including drummer Steve Corley) in mind. As reflected by the title of one of the CGQ’s earlier albums, A Group Effort, he prizes its ability to think and feel as one – to “leave fingerprints on each other’s playing.” And as signified by the title Conversance, making great music is all about band members talking to each other through their different styles.
Greene was born in Evanston, IL. He spent his formative years in the award-winning Evanston High School Wind and Jazz Ensembles. As a teenager he began to play professionally with many local pop/rock and jazz bands. Greene eventually went to Bloomington, IN to attend the prestigious Indiana University Jazz Studies program and studied with renowned professor and cellist David Baker. Greene returned to Chicago in 1994.
He has given back to the community in numerous ways, collaborating with the Shorefront Legacy Center to document the work of great Black musicians with Evanston and North suburban roots such as Fred Anderson, Bob Cranshaw and Bill Brimfield and serving as resident musician at Art Makers Outpost, an Evanston arts center for children and adults where he helped create the After Dark Concert Series. He also was on a panel of Black creatives from Evanston discussing “The Art Thing We Do” at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center.
Looking forward to his next half-century (well, why not?), Greene has all the security blankets he needs: a great band to work with, a great family to come home to, a great label to record for.