Griffin grew up in Chicago and came up through the kind of apprenticeships that made players tough — time with Lionel Hampton's band as a teenager, then stints with Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk. By the time he started recording as a leader in the mid-1950s, he already sounded like himself: a big, round tone, almost incongruously warm for someone who played with such relentless speed. He got the nickname "The Little Giant" because he was a compact guy who produced an enormous sound, and it stuck because it actually fit.

The Riverside records from the late 1950s are where most people start, and reasonably so. A Blowing Session (1957) is the one to grab first — Griffin playing alongside John Coltrane and Hank Mobley in a session that feels genuinely competitive in the best possible way. Nobody is posturing. They are all just playing as hard as they can, and Griffin holds his own against Coltrane at a moment when Coltrane was becoming Coltrane. That tells you something.

His tenure with Thelonious Monk's quartet in the late 1950s is criminally underappreciated. Griffin's thick, bluesy attack worked surprisingly well against Monk's angularity. He did not try to smooth Monk out or play around the odd corners of the compositions — he leaned into them. The live recordings from that period have an electricity to them that studio dates rarely capture.

In 1963, Griffin moved to Europe, settling eventually in Paris and later the Netherlands. This is where the story gets complicated for American audiences, because a lot of his best European work never got wide distribution back home. He recorded prolifically for minor labels, played festivals constantly, and built a reputation that in Europe approached something close to reverence. Records like The Little Giant (1959) had already established the template, but the European years gave him the freedom to stretch without commercial pressure. The Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band recordings he contributed to during this period are worth hunting down separately.

If you are coming to Griffin cold, just know that speed alone is not the point. Plenty of players are fast. Griffin was fast and swinging and funny — there is a playfulness in his phrasing that keeps even his most technically demanding runs from feeling like exercises. He sounds like someone who genuinely enjoys playing, which sounds obvious but is rarer than you'd think. He came back to the States occasionally but never really left Europe again, and when he died in France in 2008, it felt like the end of a particular kind of jazz era that had been quietly going on over there without much American fanfare.