Grant Green

Solid is a sextet session that the guitarist Grant Green recorded for Blue Note on 12 June 1964, with Alfred Lion producing and Rudy Van Gelder engineering. It then stayed unreleased until 1979. At the time the label preferred to issue Green's organ-based soul jazz records. Two of his most ambitious post-bop dates of that spring, this one and Matador, waited more than a decade in the vault.

Green had hinted at this direction on Idle Moments in 1963. For Matador he had worked with McCoy Tyner on piano, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. A few weeks later he returned to Van Gelder Studio with the same rhythm section and expanded the band with Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone and James Spaulding on alto.

The set kicks off at speed with Duke Pearson's Minor League and burns through George Russell's hard-charging Ezz-Thetic, which runs past ten minutes. Green's own Grant's Tune is more evocative and gives the guitar more space. Solid is a Sonny Rollins blues, and an emphatic version of Henderson's The Kicker closes the record.

The album came out in the LT series, produced for release by Michael Cuscuna. Reviewing it for AllMusic, Steve Huey described a bright, hard-charging affair of complex hard bop with a little modal jazz. He counted it among Green's strongest jazz outings, unusual in his catalogue for both its material and its band. The original issue carried the catalogue number LT-990, and a later CD edition added Wives and Lovers from the Matador session as a bonus track.

This Blue Note Classic Vinyl edition is stereo and all-analogue, mastered by Kevin Gray from the original master tapes and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal. It keeps the original five-track programme, with Cuscuna's liner notes.