Matador
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 essentially the John Coltrane Quartet without Coltrane, 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.
Solid
Released the same year as Matador, Solid comes from the same 1964 sessions and shares the same rhythm section. The additions here are Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone and James Spaulding on alto saxophone, which changes the dynamic considerably. Where Matador is a guitar-trio record that puts Green in stark relief against the rhythm section, Solid has a full front line, and Green's role shifts toward something more collaborative.
Henderson and Spaulding give Green two very different horn voices to play against. Henderson's tenor is muscular and harmonically searching; Spaulding's alto is sharp and angular. The contrast between them, and between both of them and Green's rounded single-note lines, produces music with real textural depth. The McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones rhythm section gives all three soloists plenty of fire to play against.
Solid is a notch below Matador, partly because the sextet context is more conventional than the spare trio format of that record, and partly because some of the tunes don't quite reach the level of Matador's material. But as a document of Grant Green in peak form with a world-class band, it absolutely delivers.
Remembering
Remembering is a late-career record made in the year Grant Green died, and listening to it now carries a weight it didn't have at the time of release. It's a quiet, reflective record, more interested in standards and ballads than in the funk-forward material that defined his early 1970s peak. The title feels apt in hindsight.
Green's guitar tone is still there, that warm, clean sound that he never really lost regardless of what the surrounding production was doing. On the slower material, you can hear him playing with an attention to each note that feels deliberate, like he's taking his time because he wants to.
Remembering is a record for people who've already heard everything else and want to understand the full shape of the career. It's not where you start. But it's a real document of where Grant Green ended up, and it deserves to be heard on those terms.
Gooden's Corner
Gooden's Corner takes its name from a St. Louis club where Grant Green played regularly before Blue Note brought him to New York. Recorded at Van Gelder Studio in December 1961 and shelved until 1980, this is another quartet date with Sonny Clark, and by now the two had developed the kind of unspoken understanding that only comes from playing the same material night after night in the studio.
Sam Jones on bass and Louis Hayes on drums give the rhythm section a slightly different feel from the usual Butch Warren and Billy Higgins pairing. Jones's bass is rounder and more centered, and Hayes plays with a swing that tilts the whole session toward mainstream jazz territory. On "What Is This Thing Called Love?" the quartet plays with a fluency that makes the standard sound freshly discovered.
Gooden's Corner is not essential in the way that Green Street or Idle Moments are essential. But it fills in the picture of what Grant Green sounded like when the tapes were rolling and the pressure was off, and the answer is: exactly like himself. The fact that it sat unreleased for nearly twenty years is the kind of thing that makes you wonder what else is still in various vaults around the world.
Nigeria
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.
The title track is a hard-swinging workout that showcases 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.
Oleo
Oleo comes from the same fertile period as Am I Blue, and it shares the same basic chemistry: Sonny Clark on piano, Sam Jones on bass, Louis Hayes on drums. As a quartet record, it puts Green out front without a horn, which is where he sounds most natural. The guitar carries all the melodic weight, and Green's single-note clarity is more than enough to fill the space.
The rhythm section here is the same one that made several of these 1962 sessions hum. Clark's comping is responsive without crowding, and Jones and Hayes lock in with the easy precision of a unit that plays together often. The title track, Sonny Rollins's "Oleo," gets a relaxed, swinging treatment that lets Green stretch out at length.
Oleo is another strong vault release from the 1962 sessions. Given how much Blue Note held back from this period, it's worth asking what else is still in the archive. What we have is already excellent.
Born to Be Blue
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.
Reaching Out
Reaching Out comes from 1968 sessions that fell between the classic period and the funk-period comeback, and you can hear the transitional quality in the music. The organ-led groove approach is solidifying, but the arrangements still have some of the harder-bop structure of the early-to-mid 1960s records. It's a record caught between two phases of a career.
Virgil Jones's trumpet adds a different texture to the front line than Grant Green typically worked with in this period, and the combination of trumpet, tenor, and guitar over organ and drums creates a fuller sound than the leaner trio and quartet records. It's a different kind of Green record, and that difference is interesting even if the material doesn't quite reach the peaks of his best work.
Released in 1989, twenty-one years after it was recorded, Reaching Out is a catalog curiosity rather than an essential. But it fills in a gap in the discography that is worth filling, and there are moments here, particularly on the slower material, that sound like Green at full strength.
Blues for Lou
Blues for Lou comes from 1963 sessions with John Patton on organ and Ben Dixon on drums, a different rhythm combination than the Larry Young dates from 1964. Patton's organ has a grittier, more blues-rooted sound, and Dixon's drumming sits right in the pocket without pushing. Some tracks add Tommy Turrentine on trumpet and George Braith on soprano saxophone and stritch, expanding the front line into something closer to a soul jazz revue.
The material here is slightly looser and more informal than the best records from those sessions, which is probably why it wasn't chosen for release at the time. But Green and Patton had a natural chemistry on blues material, and the title track, named for Lou Donaldson, is a slow-burning groove that rewards patience. Braith's stritch adds an unusual texture on the quintet tracks, a double-reed tone that sits between saxophone and oboe.
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.
First Session
First Session does exactly what the title promises: these are Grant Green's very first Blue Note recording dates, from 1961, released forty years after the fact. The first session's rhythm section tells you what kind of record this is before the guitar even enters: Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones is the Miles Davis Trio from the Kind of Blue era, and they bring that same swinging confidence. The second session expands to a quintet with Tommy Turrentine on trumpet and Charlie Rouse on tenor, backed by Sonny Clark, Butch Warren, and Billy Higgins.
Green sounds like himself already, which is the most remarkable thing about this record. He arrived at Blue Note with his sound fully formed: the clean tone, the single-note focus, the melodic directness. There is no fumbling here, no sense of a guitarist figuring out what he wants to say. He walks in and says it.
First Session is technically a footnote in the catalog, a vault document that fills in the origin story. But it's also a genuinely great record, and as an illustration of how fully formed Grant Green's voice was from the very beginning, it might be the most revealing single record in the discography. Start here or end here: either way, you'll understand who he was.
Live at Club Mozambique
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's organ here has a particular brightness to it that the Cliché Lounge recordings didn't have. It creates a slightly different pocket, a little more open, a little more willing to let the guitar carry the melodic weight without the organ filling every space. 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.