Grant Green

Matador sat in the Blue Note vault for fifteen years before it was released in 1979, and the delay is baffling once you hear it. Recorded in 1964 with McCoy Tyner on piano, Bob Cranshaw on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, this is two-thirds of John Coltrane's rhythm section with Cranshaw in Jimmy Garrison's chair, and what Grant Green does in that space is remarkable.

The rhythm section is operating at full Coltrane-quartet intensity: Tyner's dense, percussive comping, Jones's multi-dimensional drumming, Cranshaw's anchoring bass. Green doesn't try to match that intensity with speed or density. He plays with his characteristic economy, but with a seriousness and focus that meets the rhythm section where it is.

Why Blue Note held this record for fifteen years while releasing lesser material is one of the small mysteries of the catalog. Matador is essential: a document of what Grant Green could do when surrounded by the greatest rhythm section of the era. If you're new to his work, this one and Idle Moments are the place to start.

Remembering is Grant Green with Wilbur Ware on bass and Al Harewood on drums, cut at Van Gelder Studio on August 29, 1961, four weeks after the Grantstand session. The LP credits the trio alone, and jazzdisco's session listing has Horace Parlan at the piano only on a rejected first attempt at "Love Walked In," so every issued track is the trio. Blue Note shelved it, and it first appeared on the Japanese label in 1980, the year after Green's death. The US CD followed in 1998 as Standards, with an alternate take and one more tune from the same day.

The trio was a format Green liked. Richard Cook and Brian Morton note in the Penguin Guide that he spoke of preferring the uncluttered sound of guitar, bass and drums to an organ group, and they single out Ware's solos. The program is all standards: "All the Things You Are," "I'll Remember April," "Love Walked In," "If I Had You," "You and the Night and the Music" and "I Remember You."

The Penguin Guide flags one caveat: anomalies in the sound that seem to date from the 1980 remastering. AllMusic's Scott Yanow, reviewing the Standards CD, heard Green in prime form. For anyone who loves Green Street, the other trio record from 1961, this is the natural next stop.

Nigeria was recorded in January 1962 and finally released in 1980. The quartet here is Grant Green with Sonny Clark on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Art Blakey on drums: a superb rhythm section that plays with the directness and drive that Green always thrived on. Blakey in particular brings a physical intensity to the session that lifts everything around it.

Sonny Rollins's "Airegin," whose title is Nigeria spelled backward, opens the record as a hard-swinging workout that shows what this particular group could do when they locked in. Green and Clark have a natural rapport, the guitarist's clean single-note lines floating above the pianist's spare, Blues-rooted comping. Sam Jones locks with Blakey at the bottom end, and the result swings with an authority that makes the eighteen-year vault delay hard to fathom.

Nigeria is one of the better vault releases in the Blue Note catalog. It's not as immediately startling as Matador, but the rhythm section alone makes it essential. Art Blakey playing a small-group date with this kind of commitment is always worth hearing, and Green rises to the occasion.

Another vault release from the packed 1962 sessions, Born to Be Blue adds Ike Quebec on tenor to the Sonny Clark rhythm section. Quebec was one of Blue Note's great unsung tenors: a warm, dark sound, deeply rooted in the blues, with a ballad sensibility that drew from the Hawkins and Webster tradition rather than the bebop lineage.

The combination of Quebec's sound and Grant Green's guitar on the ballads is genuinely affecting. They share a certain unhurriedness, a willingness to sit inside a note and let it speak before moving on. "Born to Be Blue" the title track is handled with such care that it's almost impossible to believe it sat in a vault for twenty-three years.

Quebec would die of lung cancer in January 1963, just months after these sessions. That knowledge hangs over the record listening to it now. Born to Be Blue is the sound of two great musicians at their best, and the fact that it wasn't heard until so long after the fact is one of the sadder stories in the Blue Note catalog.

Blues for Lou is an organ trio: Green with John Patton on organ and Ben Dixon on drums, the same three who backed Lou Donaldson on Good Gracious! a month earlier. Seven of the eight tracks come from February 20, 1963; the title track, named for Donaldson, was cut on June 7. Each man brought an original: Green's "Blues for Lou," Patton's "Big John" and Dixon's "Look at That Girl."

The rest leans on R&B and pop: Ray Charles's "This Little Girl of Mine," two Lloyd Price songs, "Personality" and "Have You Ever Had the Blues," Joe Greene's "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying," and "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top." AllMusic's Ken Dryden allowed that the session may not have met Alfred Lion's standards but judged it worthy of release, and Green and Patton plainly enjoy this material.

Collectors and completists will want this immediately. Casual listeners should start with the official 1963 and 1964 releases and then come back here once they're hooked. The music is real; the framing is just less polished than the records Blue Note chose to put out at the time.

Recorded at Club Mozambique in Detroit in 1971 and released in 2006, this is the third great live document of Grant Green's funk period alongside Alive! and Live at The Lighthouse. The Detroit crowd is loud and engaged, the band is locked in, and Green sounds like he is exactly where he wants to be: in a small club, playing for people who are listening with their whole bodies.

Ronnie Foster on organ and Idris Muhammad on drums carry over from the Cliché Lounge band on Alive!, but the front line is new: two tenors, Houston Person and Clarence Thomas, who also plays soprano. It creates a slightly different pocket, a little more open, a little more willing to let the guitar carry the melodic weight. Green responds by playing with more room and more confidence in his sustain.

Live at Club Mozambique is a fitting capstone to this catalog survey. It finds Grant Green in his natural environment, a small room with a good band and people who understand what they're hearing, and it proves that the same qualities that made the 1961 Blue Note sessions so remarkable, the tone, the patience, the feel for melody, were still completely intact a decade later. He never lost it. He just kept finding new places to take it.