Homenaje a Grant Green & Jimmy D'Aquisto

A tribute that started with an object

Most tribute nights begin with an anniversary. This one began with an instrument. Aclam Club sits behind a plain doorway at Carrer del Consell de Cent 201, in the Eixample, and functions as two things at once: a concert room for around 200 people, and a private museum of more than 300 guitars, 22 classic motorcycles and a standing exhibition of analogue photography. The collection belongs to Jordi Canivell, who bought a Fender Stratocaster in 1986 and kept going for three decades; the building was gutted and rebuilt with the acoustics of the performance room as the priority, work that finished in 2019. Canivell began selling guitars under his own name, with interchangeable pickups and swappable tops, in 2021.

The double tribute to Grant Green and Jimmy D'Aquisto is the club's way of putting one of those museum pieces back into service. Its billing for the night states plainly that the collection holds the guitar D'Aquisto made for Green, and that the evening is a chance to hear it played rather than looked at. The first edition went up on 15 February 2024, doors at seven, music at eight. It has since become a recurring fixture in the venue's Aclam Sessions strand, which the club's programmer Marcel Cavallé runs across jazz, blues, soul, rock, folk and flamenco rather than committing to one style.

The guitarist and the man who built for him

Grant Green was born in St Louis on 6 June 1935 and died in New York on 31 January 1979, aged 43. Between 1961 and 1965 he appeared on more Blue Note albums, as leader or sideman, than anyone else on the label's books — a run that takes in Grant's First Stand in 1961 and Feelin' the Spirit in 1963, with Idle Moments among the records most often held up as his high point and the Detroit set Live at Club Mozambique held back until 2006. His single-note phrasing, with its mixture of bebop, blues and funk, made him the guitarist of the soul-jazz organ group, and much of his best-known work was cut in a trio with an organist, Larry Young foremost among them.

Green's instruments ran from a Gibson ES-330 and an L7 fitted with a McCarty pickup to an Epiphone Emperor and a custom D'Aquisto. The D'Aquisto that is documented in detail is an 18-inch New Yorker from 1972: tobacco sunburst, spruce top, flamed maple back and sides, maple neck with an ebony fingerboard, Green's name set into the board in mother-of-pearl and New Yorker inlaid on the headstock. Green's son has described going with his father to the luthier's house to collect it, and his father then barely putting it down. After Green's death the guitar spent a long stretch in George Benson's collection before Rudy Pensa bought it from him; it now lives at Rudy's Music in New York.

Which leaves a loose end worth stating rather than smoothing over. Aclam's claim about its own instrument rests on the club's word, published on its event page; no provenance documentation for it has been made public, and the relationship between it and the Pensa New Yorker has not been set out anywhere. What the night reliably offers is a D'Aquisto archtop from a serious collection, played in a room built for the sound, by a guitarist who has studied the repertoire it was made for.

Three musicians off the Barcelona circuit

Josep Traver was born in Barcelona in 1968 and picked up the guitar at eight. He trained at the Escola de Música de Badalona and took a guitar teaching qualification at the Conservatori Professional de Badalona, then a higher degree in jazz and modern music at ESMUC. He still teaches at the Badalona school between freelance session work and concerts, and he has written a bluegrass acoustic guitar method for the Dinsic publishing house as well as an original score for live performance against Battleship Potemkin. His playing history is wider than straight jazz: bluegrass, flatpicking, gypsy swing, country, funk, folk and rock, with more than forty records behind him and long associations with Joan Chamorro and Andrea Motis, the Gumbo Jass Band and the Dumpy Lobsters. His own release Aquarela came out in 2024.

Gerard Nieto holds a higher jazz qualification from ESMUC, leads his own trio around Barcelona and is as committed to the Hammond organ as to the piano. Esteve Pi, born in Falset in 1977, moved to Barcelona in 1997 and has been part of the city's rhythm sections since. The two have a long-standing working relationship outside this project: both appear on Scott Hamilton's Live in Barcelona recordings, with the bassist Ignasi González. That shared history matters in an organ trio, where the organist's left hand and pedals carry the bass and the drummer has to sit on top of them without a bass player as a buffer.

The record the room produced

Josep Traver Organ Trio – Tribute to Grant Green (Live at Aclam) came out on 29 March 2025 on Sotrack Records: seven pieces, 44 minutes, taped in the club. It is the clearest guide to what the trio actually does with the material. The sequence runs Just a Closer Walk with Thee, My Little Suede Shoes, I Can't Stop Loving You, Blues for Willarene, Work Song, Blues in Maude's Flat and Oleo, with nothing longer than seven and a half minutes and nothing shorter than five.

The choices are revealing. Two are Green's own blues, Blues for Willarene and Blues in Maude's Flat. One is a gospel standard, from the side of Green that produced his spirituals album. The rest come from the bebop and hard-bop common stock — Charlie Parker's My Little Suede Shoes, Nat Adderley's Work Song, Sonny Rollins's Oleo — handled at a length that leaves room for solos without turning into a jam. The album reached radio: the Catalan programme Jazz Club de Nit featured it in its edition of 13 October 2025, alongside other local and international label releases. Individual performances from the tribute, including Work Song and My Little Suede Shoes, have been posted from the club's stage.

Where it stands in October 2026

The next performance is on Friday 16 October 2026, doors at 18:30 and music at 20:00, again at Consell de Cent 201 and again billed under Aclam Sessions as a double tribute with Traver, Nieto and Pi. It is the only date on sale, which is the nature of the thing: this is not a touring production but a residency of sorts, tied to a room because the instrument and the collection are in that room and do not travel.

Around it, the club's autumn calendar gives a sense of the company it keeps — Emma Swift and Luther Russell the night before on 15 October, Biel Ballester's quintet on 23 October, Will Hoge on 22 October, and the Neal Sugarman Organ Combo on 2 December. Organ-led music recurs there deliberately. For a show whose entire premise is an archtop guitar and a Hammond in a small, acoustically treated space, that programming is the point rather than the backdrop.