Grant Green: Nigeria (Tone Poet series) [BLUE NOTE]

Why you'll love it

This Tone Poet edition comes on 180g vinyl in a gatefold jacket, mastered from the original analogue tapes. The quartet is a dream lineup, and AllMusic gave the album 4.5 stars.

This edition

• Tone Poet series
• 180g vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• All-analogue mastering from the original tapes
• Stereo mix

About the album

Some of the best Blue Note sessions spent years in the vault. Grant Green cut this one on January 13, 1962, with Sonny Clark on piano, Sam Jones on bass and Art Blakey on drums, and it finally came out in 1980 under the title Nigeria.

Green's clean, horn-like single-note lines are all over it. Sonny Rollins' "Airegin" opens at a brisk, swinging clip, the Gershwins' "It Ain't Necessarily So" stretches past ten minutes into a slow, bluesy conversation, and Cole Porter's "I Concentrate on You" and Kern and Hammerstein's "The Song Is You" show how much fun this band had with a standard. Clark and Green were a superb pairing, and Blakey pushes everything along without ever crowding it.

AllMusic summed it up as just classic Green. It waited eighteen years for its turn, which is a long time to keep Art Blakey sitting quietly.

Also at Kops: more Grant Green on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Blue Note (cat# B0031299-01), a reissue of the 1980 album.