The Grant Green-Sonny Clark Connection

In a little over four months, the guitarist and pianist recorded together five times. All but one song sat in the Blue Note vault for a generation.

Welcome music lovers to a new edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!

This time around, I’m writing about a series of recordings that guitarist Grant Green made with pianist Sonny Clark for Blue Note Records between October 1961 and March 1962. Except for one track, ‘Count Every Star,’ which was released in 1962, everything they recorded together went unreleased for at least 20 years, something that was not uncommon at the label.

The music they made together represents one of Green’s finest statements as a guitarist who truly mastered the lyricism required of a musician who found his niche as a single-line player. It is also a treasure trove of engrossing solos by Clark, a deeply imaginative pianist of great taste.

I hope you enjoy the essay and will let me know your thoughts too! Drop a comment below.

Next up will be something a little different, a more personal reflection on my feelings about the music of the Eagles. I confess I am not a big Eagles fan but find that even saying that brings up some interesting contradictions. As part of the essay, there will be some thoughts on Linda Ronstadt, Randy Newman and the prolific studio scene of the seventies.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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It doesn’t waste any time cutting to the chase. Around a repeated four-note descending pattern played authoritatively by the pianist and the bassist, and underlined by a cascading cymbal motif and a call and response on the snare and tom by the drummer, the guitarist plays two concise statements of the song’s primary thematic material. The sound of the guitar is metallic and piercing as if the strings are being stabbed at rather than picked. The drummer slips into a fat shuffle beat for extended solos by the guitarist and the pianist. Each offers chorus after chorus of economical phrasing, never straying too far from the catchy, bluesy melody line of the song the four musicians are playing: George and Ira Gershwin, and DuBose Heyward’s ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ from Porgy and Bess.

The guitarist is Grant Green. The pianist is Sonny Clark. The bassist is Sam Jones. The drummer is Art Blakey. It’s January 13, 1962 and the four are recording a session for Blue Note at the (Rudy) Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Six tracks would be recorded—five of them standards and the other, one of Sonny Rollins’ most recognizable lines. There is a glow to the music—the sheen mostly resulting from having Blakey on the date, taking on, by that time, an extremely infrequent appearance as a sideman.

The first song they tackled was the Rollins piece, ‘Airegin.’ Green charges through the theme. Blakey’s accents throughout add propulsive momentum. Everyone gets to solo. Green’s clipped phrasing contrasts with Clark’s more deliberative lines that are occasionally punctuated with a funky aside. Jones walks during his brief improvisation and Blakey favous the toms in his spot, keeping the beat balanced like a tightrope walker.

‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ concluded the session. The deep simpatico between the four had become airtight. Blakey, in particular, is a cheerleader during Green and Clark’s solos. It’s not so much in what he plays (when inspiration struck, he could sound as if he were sparring with whomever was soloing—Miles Davis’ recording of Bud Powell’s ‘Tempus Fugit’ from 1953 and Hank Mobley’s ‘Roll Call’ from 1960 are just two examples) but in what he says.

Green’s recording of the song treats it like a blues. It’s a form on which he could stretch out seemingly forever. Both ‘Blues From Hoss’ Flat’ and ‘The Other Part of Town’ (the latter was recorded for Horace Parlan’s Up and Down) have Green soloing for over five minutes. ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ is no exception. Green’s choruses are compact. The phrase with which he opens is one he returns to over and over again as each chorus builds on the preceding one. But what Green is doing is not simply playing the blues. He is preaching. Blakey stands in for the congregation.

On Green’s third chorus, he shouts “ya wow!” and plays one of his signature tricks—a one-two-three crash on the cymbal—to lead into the fourth. As the guitarist moves onto his sixth chorus, Blakey lays down a thunderous press roll. At the start of the tenth, Blakey and Green lock step on the triple-cymbal motif. On the next, Blakey shouts out an “aha!” and then on the next, as Green gets lost in a furious lick, repeating it over and over again (one of his signature tricks as an improviser), Blakey is all “woo!” On the fourteenth, Blakey urges Green to keep going with a “go!” His continues his exhortations on the fifteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth chorus—Green’s last—of his solo. He then hands things off to Clark.

The pianist’s solo continues the intense feel in the studio (as was often the case on a session with Jones, his unshakable walking gait on the bass was so in the pocket that it is completely absorbed into the collective sound). Clark is involved in a two-handed dialogue with the left continually sketching out the descending riff that is the signature of this interpretation of ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ while the right spins off variation after variation of the main melody line. If Green’s preaching was forceful, Clark’s lower-key incantations leave his flock hanging on every phrase. Blakey continues to respond in kind. As Clark rolls out on the opening chorus, the drummers answers with a “yeah!” A press roll ushers in the third chorus as Clark ups the funk factor. He two-hands the fourth, and left and right hand lock in union on the fifth. Blakey likes what he is hearing, he shouts out another “woo!” Clark moves into Monkian territory on the seventh with a jagged deconstruction of the theme. Blakey goes “woo hoo!” On the ninth, Clark is ready to wrap up. He plays a slight variation of the theme but Blakey knows he’s got more in him. He yells out, “no, go ahead, go ahead.” Clark moves to a chordal reverie to another “woo!” from Blakey. A final chorus concentrates on the left hand. Green and Blakey then do battle through a series of fours. The guitarist is incandescent and forceful. Blakey responds with volleys on the snare and the toms. After a repeat of the theme, there’s a short fade-out, concluding a performance of epic proportions.

If asked to keep only one performance by Grant Green, I’d pick, without too much remorse about what would be cast aside, ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So.’ In fact, I’d go further and pick it as one of the ten defining performances of Blue Note’s golden era, a period of time starting in 1954 with Blakey’s legendary live recording at Birdland with Clifford Brown and ending roughly in 1969.

What was taped between ‘Airegin’ and ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ is equally notable. All are standout examples of the Great American Songbook. Two—‘The Night We Called It a Day’ and ‘Nancy (With the Laughing Face)’—are taken at ballad tempo. Green states the themes with minimal adornment, especially on the latter. On the remaining, taken more briskly—‘I Concentrate on You’ and ‘The Song is You’—he is less reverent. The choices he makes on both are highly astute. On the former, he personalizes (in all honesty, improves) Cole Porter’s melody, shifting it both rhythmically and melodically. On the latter, Green is dazzling in how he imparts the dynamism required to sing Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s song. He is deeply theatrical, particularly on the bridge. Green uses stops and starts to imbue it with bravado. On his solo however, the bridge trips him up—it’s pretty knotty. Clark has an easier time with it. Blakey keeps up a powerful beat, turning the performance into a real barnburner.

‘I Concentrate On You’ is more sedate but absolutely lovely. The introduction paraphrases the opening of Miles Davis’ (actually Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s) ‘Four’ and ends with a pretty tag that has Green repeating the song’s title over Clark’s graceful pedal point.

Overall, the session exemplifies the quality that was Blue Note’s calling card. And yet, it went unreleased for 18 years. Consigning a date to languish in the vault was, of course, not out of the ordinary for the label or the recording partnership of Green and Clark. In just over four months, they recorded five times together with just one track, ‘Count Every Star,’ released during either musician’s lifetime.

Green first paired with Clark on October 27, 1961 with Butch Warren on bass and Billy Higgins on drums only yielded two tracks and only one, two takes of the bebop classic ‘Woody ’n’ You’ eventually came out at the turn of the millennium.

Their next three sessions, taped over a span of just under six weeks, were first released in 1979 and 1980, with the session with Blakey released domestically and the other two only available in Japan. They were first collected together through a Mosaic Records boxset in 1990 and then more widely released on a two CD set on Blue Note called The Complete Quartet Sessions with Sonny Clark. It leads off with the Blakey date, initially released as Nigeria, possibly because it is the best of the three sessions even though it was not the first recorded. That was what was titled Gooden’s Corner when it came out in Japan. Recorded on December 23, 1961, Green and Clark teamed up with Jones and Louis Hayes on drums, who were in Cannonball Adderley’s band from 1959 to 1965.

Hayes’ presence—he was a lighter player than Blakey—brings the temperature down. Like Jones, he was an imperturbable timekeeper. Not surprisingly then, the pulse is king here resulting in a session which is low key and where the listener is more like an eavesdropper, sitting in on a night in which the musicians gather informally to play. While the sequencing of the album is not in the order in which it was recorded, it does feel as if it simulates the gradual gelling of a group.

While their interpretations of ‘On Green Dolphin Street,’ ‘Shadrack’ and ‘What is This Thing Called Love?’ are engaging, the performances (especially the latter two) don’t exactly register. Again, it’s not the musicians, it’s more a feeling of a lack of a personal imprimatur onto the material. They just exist.

That’s certainly not the case with ‘Moon River,’ recorded just two-and-a-half months after Breakfast at Tiffany’s premiered. The emphasis on the tag at the end of Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer’s soon-to-be Oscar-winning song adds a hipness that in other interpretations, often gets drowned in sugary syrup. Green’s statement of the theme puts the music on top of the beat rather than sailing slowly behind. He also often hints at the melody rather than being entirely faithful to it. His improvisation, along with Clark’s, doesn’t stray too far from it, however. These are crisp, amiable statements.

The good feeling carries to the casual blues ‘Gooden’s Corner.’ Green and Clark are laid back, offering statements that simmer and never boil over. ‘Two for One,’ Green’s paraphrase of Davis’ modal masterwork ‘So What’ (something Green had recorded earlier in 1961) is appealingly mellow. His solo lines are fluid and Clark adds choral eruptions at the end of his first and third solo choruses that add dramatic flair.

At the end of January 1962, Green and Clark met up at the Van Gelder Studio for the fourth time; Jones and Hayes also in toe. A slow, passionate version of Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Little Girl Blue’ dedicated to nurturing the pathos of the standard, ‘Tune Up,’ the second song typically credited to Davis that came from the pen of Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and a Green line, ‘Hip Funk,’ are all shorthand for the kind of music Green and Clark made together. Long on improvisation and short on flash.

Green’s take on Rollins’ ‘Oleo’ is odd insofar that he is playing an approximation of the admittedly serpentine theme and that feeling of dislocation never really resolves itself. The decision to record a version of ‘My Favourite Things’ that merges its harmonic structure with John Coltrane’s immortal deconstruction of it is the kind of strangeness that connects. By creating a chorus structure that consists of sections of the song that resolve into a static pedal point, Green and group have the best of both worlds, a kind of summation of two strands of jazz—one on the wane, the other on the rise. It is the most forward-looking performance that Green and Clark would put on tape.

Their final meeting took place one month later. It too has its gaze cast in both directions. It’s Green, Clark, Jones and Hayes one more time with Ike Quebec added on tenor saxophone who was in the middle of recording a series of albums that were one of the few times where Blue Note mined the territory that Verve Records corralled in the fifties with the holy trinity of tenor players: Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Lester Young, all on the label at the same time, albeit with the polish of Lion’s prevision of pre-session rehearsals, something that Verve’s Norman Granz eschewed.

The music the five made stayed hidden in the vault for 23 years and was eventually released as Born to Be Blue (it included ‘Count Every Star,’ recorded at the December 23, 1961 session and released on Quebec’s Blue and Sentimental a year later). It bursts with congeniality. A swinging take of ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ sets the tone. A super-fun introduction with Green and Quebec twinning on a stuttering, swaggering riff is the perfect set-up for the guitarist to glide through the theme. Sandwiching Quebec’s gruff, growly tenor—akin to Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Illinois Jacquet—between Green and Clark’s solos provides wonderful contrast.

The three ballads on the session all hew close to their source material. The title track, a gorgeous piece of writing by Mel Tormé and Robert Wells, centers on the bridge, the only part of the song on which Green solos. On ‘My One and Only Love,’ so good that it may as well be the textbook definition of a love song, Quebec’s solo on the whole structure never strays very far from the melody.

‘If I Should Lose You,’ the kind of standard with a harmonic structure that is a proving ground for the improvising musician, is mid-tempo and also prioritizes the wonderful thematic material at play. The crown jewel of the session is ‘Back in Your Own Back Yard.’ Everyone burns. Quebec begins his solo with an ace quote of Ellington’s ‘What Am I Here For?’ but it’s Grant who is most locked in. His final solo is especially hot, so much so that it’s a bit of a disappointment when Quebec takes over on the bridge of Green’s second solo chorus.

Four years after its initial release, Born to Be Blue was augmented by two extra performances. ‘Cool Blues,’ a Charlie Parker line, is good and ‘Outer Space,’ a Green line, has a modern edge and an invigorating, lingering cadence.

Of all the Green/Clark sessions, Born to Be Blue is the one where the decision to keep it under lock and key is the most inexplicable. Why label boss Arthur Lion decided to shelve all these recordings by the guitarist, whom he signed in 1960 at the behest of Lou Donaldson, is not entirely clear.

The most common rationale offered is that Green, at the end of 1961, was primarily seen as an organ-trio player; a guitarist of grits and gravy. It seems a reasonable explanation but doesn’t really pass muster. Two of Green’s earliest sessions on Blue Note: the guitar-bass-drums trio date Green Street and the traditional quartet date Sunday Mornin’, have little to do with what would soon become known as soul jazz. The sessions with Clark accentuate the mistake of putting Green into a box even at this early point in his career. And besides, the aesthetic of these recordings were where Green was headed anyway with Idle Moments and a fruitful studio partnership with organist Larry Young and drummer Elvin Jones soon to come. As of now, the recordings Green made with Clark have been available far longer than they have been kept unreleased. That’s really the only pertinent fact now: they are permanently here to dig.

If you’re not yet a subscriber of ‘Listening Sessions,’ I hope you'll click the button below to subscribe and get each edition delivered straight to your inbox. I publish a long-form essay on music three times a month, every 10 days or so.