The albums made by Al Green and Willie Mitchell for Hi Records in the seventies are among the greatest recordings in American music history. They display their greatness in many ways: the song-writing, arranging (i.e. the writing of parts for the various instruments. It is not quite the same as orchestration in classical music, which is more about distributing already written lines to the proper sections of the orchestra. Arranging is on a par with, and is in fact similar to, composing in terms of importance in some types of music. It became an accepted art form with the advent of jazz.) and of course, Al Green's entirely original and wonderful singing. But the aspect of the recordings that I'd like to discuss today is the sound achieved by the instrumentalists. In music, "touch", "feel", and "time" are the primary reasons that a player achieves a great sound. Touch involves knowing precisely how hard to hit each note - for the tempo and mood of the piece, for the phrase being played, for the place of the part within the whole. Serious instrumentalists spend a great deal of time practicing with metronomes to achieve the fullest sound possible. It's like focusing a microscope and involves listening for both the primary and secondary waves of each note. A great player can make a quarter-note sound like it has an eighth-note twin, or even a triplet just by how he or she plays it. "Feel" involves understanding the layers of played and implied rhythms, and playing accordingly (one of the hardest things to do in music is to play swing eighth-notes in jazz, for example). "Time" is the ability to maintain a tempo, and to understand and play what Hendrix called "what goes between the notes".
Which brings us back to the Al Green albums. These recordings, under the direction of Mitchell and Green, are masterpieces of sound, and the reason for that is the touch, feel and time of the many players involved. To this day, to give one example, you will not hear drumming sound more beautiful on a pop recording than on Call Me from 1973. If you haven't heard it and the rest of these albums, put your ears on.