Johnny Griffin - A Blowing Session (2025 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series 180g Mono Vinyl LP)

Johnny Griffin - A Blowing Session | Vinyl LP - 2025 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series Mono Reissue (7507954, mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, pressed at Optimal Media)

• Three tenors in one room: Johnny Griffin, John Coltrane and Hank Mobley, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder in Hackensack on 6 April 1957, a few months before Coltrane made Blue Train.
• Lee Morgan, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Art Blakey complete the band, with an eighteen-year-old Morgan holding his own against the three saxophones.
• Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series, all-analogue mono: mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original tapes, 180g vinyl pressed at Optimal Media in Germany.

Johnny Griffin was Chicago’s “Little Giant”, a small man with a big sound and a reputation for speed, and his second Blue Note album put that reputation up against the strongest competition going. He cut it at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio on 6 April 1957 with John Coltrane and Hank Mobley as the other two tenors. The opener, Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight”, goes off at a tempo Marc Davis of All About Jazz reckoned was faster than possibly any other bop recording, and he noted that only Mobley seems to strain to keep up. Griffin pours out long, complicated lines at that speed. Coltrane, still a few months from Blue Train, is closer to Griffin in sound than you might expect, while Mobley’s more relaxed, bluesy phrasing gives the ear somewhere to rest. Next to the two Kern standards are two Griffin originals, “Ball Bearing” and “Smoke Stack”, and everything after the opener settles into friendlier tempos with good changes to blow on.

It is one of those Blue Note line-ups that looks improbable on paper. Coltrane had not yet led a session for the label, Lee Morgan was eighteen and already recording as a leader for Alfred Lion, and Paul Chambers was Miles Davis’ bassist at the time, with Wynton Kelly and Art Blakey completing the rhythm section. Ira Gitler wrote the liner notes, Francis Wolff and Harold Feinstein took the photographs, and the front cover and labels carry the “Vol. 2” of the original release. Griffin went on to Monk’s quartet and, in the 1960s, to Europe, where he spent most of the rest of his career. This Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series edition is in mono, as the record was first issued, mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio from the original analogue tapes and pressed on 180g vinyl at Optimal Media in Germany. This is the 2025 Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series mono reissue, catalogue number 7507954.