Guitar blues
Two new reissues in Blue Note’s Classic Vinyl series—Grant Green’s Idle Moments and Kenny Burrell’s Midnight Blue—capture peaks of jazz guitar’s possibilities at a juncture when modernism was primed for a shift to something else. Both albums were recorded in 1963; both sport “the Blue Note sound,” which engineer Rudy Van Gelder had refined to its high point. But the two albums lay out very different musical paths.
Green’s album follows the modal outlines that Gil Evans and George Russell had the guitar—with a lithe, limber touch, in the manner of a horn player but also with a precise, steely clarity. There’s a bracing, breezy quality to his playing that’s unlike any other jazz guitarist’s.
