Grant Green

LP version. I Want To Hold Your Hand reunites guitarist Grant Green, organist Larry Young and drummer Elvin Jones, a trio with a rare chemistry. To them it adds the tenor saxophone of Hank Mobley. Recorded in March 1965 and issued in 1966, it turns a pop hit, a bossa nova and four standards into a sophisticated, quietly soulful set. After it Green did not record for the label again until 1969.

The session took place on March 31, 1965, at the Englewood Cliffs studio of Rudy Van Gelder, with Alfred Lion producing. The trio had first come together on Green's 1964 album Talkin' About, and a few months later recorded Street of Dreams as a quartet with vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. This time the fourth voice is a tenor saxophone. Mobley plays on five of the six tracks and sits out This Could Be The Start Of Something, which is left to the trio. The original liner notes are by Ira Gitler.

The title song by The Beatles is recast as a bossa nova, a choice that sounded odd on paper and works on record. It leads naturally to Antonio Carlos Jobim's Corcovado, played with the same light touch. The rest of the programme comes from the standard repertoire, with Kurt Weill's Speak Low, Victor Young's Stella By Starlight and Cole Porter's At Long Last Love. Green keeps to the clean single-note lines he was known for. Young, rather than pushing the groove as a soul jazz organist would, works as a harmonic partner, and Jones keeps the rhythm supple underneath.

The record came at the end of an extraordinarily busy five years for Green, during which he recorded more than twenty hard bop and soul jazz sessions for Blue Note. Reviewing it for AllMusic, Steve Huey argued that behind the familiar material the playing remains quietly advanced, in the interplay of the rhythm and in the soloists' harmonic choices. When Green came back to the label in 1969 he had moved towards the jazz-funk of his later years.

This stereo Tone Poet edition was produced by Joe Harley and mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original analogue master tapes. It is pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI and packaged in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket.