Grant Green

Idle Moments is often recommended as the first Grant Green record to own. Recorded in November 1963 and released by Blue Note in February 1965, it places his guitar in an unusual sextet with vibraphone, piano and tenor saxophone. Its title track, a slow Duke Pearson theme stretched to almost fifteen minutes, sets the unhurried tone of the whole record.

A year before the session the DownBeat critics had named Green a rising star of the guitar, on the strength of his agile single-note playing. Here he is joined by Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, Pearson on piano, Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Al Harewood on drums. The music was recorded at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs on November 4 and 15, 1963, with Rudy Van Gelder engineering.

The length of Idle Moments was an accident. Pearson explained in his liner notes that it was meant to be much shorter. The musicians played the main melody twice and lost track of whether a chorus was sixteen or thirty-two bars. The take had a mood the band could not recapture, so it was kept. As the piece unfolds slowly, each colour of the ensemble comes forward in turn, from Hutcherson's crystalline vibraphone to Henderson's tenor.

To balance the album, the band returned on November 15 to record shorter versions of two pieces. One is Green's nimble Jean De Fleur, the other Django, the John Lewis theme from the Modern Jazz Quartet book, taken here in a bluesy direction. Pearson's driving Nomad completes the original programme. Writing for AllMusic, Steve Huey called it the essential first purchase for anyone new to Green, and Scott Yanow listed it among seventeen essential hard bop recordings.

This Japanese Ultimate High Quality CD (UHQCD) from Universal Music Japan, issued in 2024 as UCCQ-9729, keeps the original four-track LP sequence without the longer alternate takes. It is remastered by Kevin Gray and comes in a jewel case with obi.