Soul artist’s classic sound blended with contemporary music
People regularly approach Al Green to tell him their children were conceived to his music.
“That makes me think the people have been awful naughty,” the ’70s soulman said with a laugh in a telephone interview from Memphis. “That’s the concept we’re trying to do. You gotta have family.”
Trying to pin down Green about what he does is like trying to capture that silky voice as it soars into falsetto gymnastics, then swoops into a jazzy filigree tempered by rock-solid soul. He refers to himself in the third person, his speech sometimes rising into the stirring cadences of a man of the cloth. Green released “Lay It Down,” his latest CD, in May.
Co-produced by Roots drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, “Lay It Down” weaves Green’s classic sound with contemporary artists like John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae and Anthony Hamilton. Much of the loose collaboration was recorded live as Green improvised lyrics. Call it retro-soul from one of the artists who inspired the genre in the first place.
“It’s just a miracle,” Green said. “How it came about, nobody knows. We said, ‘Let’s get the work done.’
“When you start recording with them, they kind of cast a spell on you,” he said of his bandmates, who included Thompson, organist James Poyser and the late Spanky Alford on guitar. Brooklyn’s celebrated Dap-Kings Horns, who played on Amy Winehouse’s retro smash “Back to Black,” complete the soulstirring lineup.
“I usually write spontaneously,” he said. “Why don’t you try it? It’s the spontaneity of what you feel.”
Green and his 14-piece orchestra will perform at the Santa Fe Opera at 8 p.m. Saturday. People still talk about his blistering performance at the opera three years ago.
“Man, we had a good time there,” he mused. “What an audience. We bombed! It should be fantastic!”
Now 62, Green grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he sang gospel with the Greene Brothers, a family quartet. After high school, he worked in a car wash. Raised on Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, Green crossed paths with Willie Mitchell in Texas, where both were performing. The serendipitous meeting resulted in Green’s signing to the Memphis-based Hi Records in 1969. Mitchell produced and co-wrote material for Green. Their combustive collaboration would result in 13 top 40 hits, including “Tired of Being Alone,” “I’m Still in Love with You” and “Let’s Stay Together.” Green set the standard for simmering ’70s soul.
But he insists he never thought he would make it.
“I didn’t know what God was doing,” he said.
In 1974, personal tragedy drove him from the stage to the pulpit. The story still lives in rock ’n’ roll infamy: a female friend scalded him with a pot of boiling grits, then later shot herself dead.
“I didn’t find Him,” Green declared. “He found me. I was hanging by one fingernail.
“I was converted,” he continued. “That was 31 years ago. I really was born again. We started the church in ’76. In December, it will be 32 years.”
Green still helms the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis on Sundays when he isn’t touring. He had always been torn between the secular and the spiritual. But he realized he had always sung about love with an ecstasy and reverence that bordered on the religious. His work contained a touch of praise from the very beginning.
“God is in relationships, making a home for the husband and wife and kids,” he said. “God is in everything. He’s in the trees and the birds and the fish.”
“Lay It Down” isn’t his first secular release since the classic “Belle Album” announced his embrace of gospel in 1977. On his previous Blue Note albums “I Can’t Stop” (2003) and “Everything’s OK” (2005), Green reunited with Mitchell and enlisted some of the original musicians who played on his chart-topping sessions.
With Poyser and Thompson serving as key players in the alternative hip-hop scene, it’s easy to view Green’s most recent outing as a commercial attempt to update one of soul’s original deacons. But this collision of old school melodies with cutting-edge technology finds the young acolytes bowing to the master.
Legend joins Green on “Stay With Me (By the Sea),” a dreamy ballad written largely by Rae and signaling the cooperative spirit of the album. “You’ve Got the Love I Need,” written and recorded with Hamilton, smolders with a funky chorus that makes simplicity a virtue. The title track purrs and coos in cozy insinuation. Rae flew in from London to join him on “Take Your Time.”
“She’s this tiny little thing with a big guitar,” Green said. “She doesn’t seem like she can do it, but man, the sound coming out of that thing.
“And with the debut of the album in the top 10; these are high marks,” Green continued. “I’m grateful. I’m the little brown kid from Grand Rapids. I had my two little songs (‘Tired of Being Alone’ and ‘Let’s Stay Together’) in a brown paper bag. I was ‘Tired of Being Alone.’ I’d say, ‘Don’t touch my bag.’ I had a mental problem about that bag.”
For his next project, he’s thinking of switching genres and gears again, this time in Boston.
“I know the jazz people up there are part of Duke Ellington’s songs. I just want to do the songs I was singing at 14-15-16 years old.”
If You Go
WHAT: The Rev. Al Green
WHERE: Santa Fe Opera, seven miles north of Santa Fe on the west side of U.S. 84/285
WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday
COST: $39-$77; $25 standing room
CONTACT: 986-5900
