Grover Washington, Jr.
Mister Magic

The good fortune of an artist, paraphrasing Seneca, begins to shine when talent meets opportunity, the renowned train of life that passes for each of us but doesn't whistle and doesn't stop. It takes skill to recognize it and jump on board, to avoid staying on the ground forever.

The crowded platforms of the station teem with people hurrying along, dragging heavy suitcases, while others impatiently watch the large clock dominating the track. Amidst all this commotion, for various reasons, some are left behind. Grover watches them from the window as the train breaks its inertia.

When I was eight, my parents gave me a Lima electric train. Three days later, I decided to analyze the consequences of a derailment, projecting the tracks into the void beyond the kitchen table. It sliced through the air confidently, until coming to a fatal halt upon impact. Instead, Grover Jr., at eight, was given a saxophone. Just saying.

Talent and opportunity, opportunity and talent. However you choose to see or read them, they are both friends of fate, which appears at Grover Jr.'s platform on the day of his eighth birthday, in the guise and hands of his father. Just saying. But also not, because there is always an event in the life of artists that changes the ordinary, the cornerstone of the turning point, the spark that ignites the flame. Anyway, a destiny written and read on the walls of the house. The mother sings in the neighborhood church choir, the brother is an organist at the same place, the father collects records and has a passion for the saxophone, and the younger brother plays the drums. A house where you find music stuck in your teeth after meals, in yawns, in the closet rummaging among the utensils. And then there are them, his illustrious friends Benny Goodman and Fletcher Henderson, who float lightly in his rooms, radiated by the brass trumpet. It's obvious that in such a context, you don't end up making music by accident.

"Mister Magic" sees the light on February 7, 1975, after four albums and some tribute covers dedicated to his teenage idols, and it's the album of maturity. It is because it's the most beautiful, as Washington himself admits. It is because Bob James, in excellent shape, creates a range of arrangements considered among the most brilliant and successful of his life. It is because the stylistic evolution of Grover, since that eighth birthday, has been completed and consecrated. It is because one only needs to listen to the album to understand it.

I was saying, it's 1975, and Grover Washington is definitively consecrated and sent to nurture the list of forefathers of Smooth Jazz.

Smooth was welcomed, especially in its beginnings, very ferociously by jazz lovers, a debate that dragged on for a long time in social salons, both due to the myopia of purists and standard jazz Taliban, and because of the multitude of poor-quality products, for the amateurish after-work revelry of some artists who tainted this interesting path with embarrassing superficiality, such that today smooth is considered by the genre's gotha as a lesser but valuable child, a hobo with cufflinks at his wrists, the Mercedes parked in the Ferrari showroom that doesn't look out of place.

"Mister Magic," in particular, despite the title given to Washington, features little representation of smooth, strongly inclined and projected toward an interesting jazz-funk undergrowth beloved by many of his contemporary colleagues such as Idris Muhammad, Herbie Hancock, or Stanley Clarke, to name a few. This is evident from the opening of "Earth Tones," with its twelve and a half minutes steeped in a dense tropical atmosphere, where screeching birds phrase with Grover's sax, climbing impossible scales, just like in the eponymous "Mister Magic," a funky mantra that spreads into a flowing improvisation between knotty Grover solos and Gale's strings. "Passion Flower," the album’s most orchestral piece and also the most saccharine, moves forward somnolently, painting chamomile fields. With a gun to my head, it's the track I would throw off the tower, but with a thousand regrets. But there is still time, time for jolts, spirituality, time for hermetic mysticism that surprisingly reveals itself, losing its camouflage at the soul’s doorstep, in the tight trajectories and alternation of tonal ups and downs that compose the concluding "Black Frost." And Washington still there, lost in one of the thousand Chinese boxes crafted by his saxophone. There, set in time, composing an infinite scale.

Grover caught his train in time but got off too soon and unfortunately forever. I like to imagine him as a little boy of eight, with his nose pressed against the window, realizing he left his saxophone on the station platform.
Someone notices it and hands it to him through the window, saying thank you.

"I should be the one thanking you"
"No, really, thank you."