Tom Varner

Motion / Stillness is the second album by French horn player Tom Varner for Soul Note, after his debut Tom Varner Quartet. It was cut in March 1982 and first released on LP in 1983. The quartet pairs the horn with Ed Jackson on alto saxophone, over Ed Schuller on bass and Billy Hart on drums. Varner wrote the whole original program himself, five pieces, from two long ones to short tunes of three or four minutes.

Varner also produced the session, with Giovanni Bonandrini as executive producer, Kazunori Sugiyama as engineer, cover art by Maria Bonandrini and liner notes by Nat Hentoff. Two pieces carry most of the weight: Subway Awakening, which opens at over eleven minutes, and New Moonshiner, close to fourteen. Between them come Study #1 and Neutron Bomb Shuffle, and Freddy Did It closes the original sequence in under three and a half minutes. This CD then adds three tracks that were not on the first release: the standard Indian Summer by Victor Herbert and Al Dubin, Varner's The Otter, and Ornette Coleman's Comme Il Faut. The credits of this edition add Adam Nussbaum on drums, and the running time grows to over seventy minutes.

This is the Soul Note CD 121067-2, which Discogs lists as a reissue of the album first released on LP in 1983 as SN 1067, here with three bonus tracks.