*100 copies limited edition* New York City ensemble Part-Time Samurai introduces Grass Is Greener, its debut album for 577 Records: a collection of music shaped by movement, uncertainty, memory, and the gradual recognition that a life in transition can also be a life taking shape.

Led by saxophonist, vocalist, composer, and bandleader Noah Galbreath, Part-Time Samurai brings together trumpet, trombone, saxophone, vocals, keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums in music that moves freely between intricate written passages and open improvisation, restless rhythmic motion and spacious melody. Jazz, soul, progressive rock, pop, and funk are present not as fixed points of reference, but as elements in a language that belongs to the ensemble itself.

The music can be dense and highly articulated, with tightly interlocking horn and rhythm-section figures, shifting meters, and extended instrumental passages. Elsewhere, a simple melody or persistent groove is allowed to carry the weight. Across the album, these contrasts become part of the storytelling: complexity beside directness, precision beside looseness, humor beside uncertainty.

Grass Is Greener grew largely out of Galbreath’s experience of moving from Virginia to New York City in 2023 and attempting to build a life as a professional musician. The album’s title emerged during a particularly difficult period, when a challenging teaching position in New York prompted him to look back toward the life he had left behind. The familiar question — whether the grass might have been greener somewhere else — became something larger: a meditation on choices, missed possibilities, nostalgia, and the difficulty of knowing what a different life might have looked like.