Easy Being Green.(Al Green's new album 'Lay It Down')(Sound recording review)

The seminal hip-hop group Public Enemy, still going strong after twenty years, recently released an album titled "How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?" The new Al Green album, "Lay It Down" (Blue Note), addresses the same issue, though less stridently. Green's career has been filled with ambivalence toward soul music, even as he was its chief standard-bearer. In the late seventies, he abandoned secular music for a career in gospel. He stood near the dividing line for several years and then, in 2003, crossed back over for good, making a pair of wonderful, autumnal soul records with his longtime collaborator Willie Mitchell.

"Lay It Down" is a different exercise altogether. Here, Green worked with Ahmir (?uestlove) Thompson, the drummer from the Roots, and a small band of musicians--the guitarist Chalmers (Spanky) Alford, the bassist Adam Blackstone, and the keyboardist James Poyser--who have, together and apart, provided the backbone for neo-soul releases by artists such as D'Angelo, Jill Scott, and Musiq Soulchild. The idea for "Lay It Down" was to pair Green with today's top young soul vocalists, and about half the album follows that formula: ...