Grover's music was introduced to me by the sax player from a band I was in during the late 70's. He was really good player and was into the Live at the Bijou album at the time and could virtually play it note perfect and used lots of guitar effects on his sax. Not long after that I heard the Mister Magic album and that totally blew me away.
Unfortunately I've never seen Grover live but to me he had the right mix of Jazz funk, smooth but not sickly smooth and those funky grooves are awesome. The Winelight album was the icing on the cake and certainly this side of the pond, it was at the time the album to have in your collection.
I was actually on holiday in Florida when it came over the news that he had died. 10 years later I decided to put on a tribute gig here in my city and it went down a storm, we packed the venue out and since then there have always been some of his tracks in my jazzier set lists. 15 years on, it's time to do it again so I've organised it with one of the performing arts colleges and will be using their main auditorium for this gig. The risk is on me this time as promoter, I'm paying up-front so I need to sell loads of tickets to fill the place so if you know any UK fans and can point them in the direction of the gig that would be cool.
From the first rehearsal we had last week without the sax player, ( who is on tour in China), It promises to be a great pre-Christmas night whatever the footfall is as we are gonna have a fantastic time recreating this music.
I'm inviting some agents and promoters to see if we can take the show to some other venues in the UK next year and if we could get some international opportunities that would be superb.
