Lee Morgan

Everybody knows the first twenty seconds. The bass figure, the drums falling in behind it, and then that riff, which is not really a melody so much as a hook with a horn attached. What gets forgotten is that the rest of the record is a straight hard bop date with Joe Henderson on it, and that the boogaloo tune was cut on December 21, 1963, in one afternoon at Van Gelder's, by a quintet assembled for the date.

Henderson is the reason to keep listening past side one. He had been on Blue Note for less than a year and he plays here like someone who has decided the groove is a dare. "Totem Pole" is the best thing on the album by a distance, ten minutes of Morgan and Henderson trading over Billy Higgins, and "Gary's Notebook" has a minor-key tension that has nothing to do with the hit. Barry Harris is the quiet story: a bebop pianist dropped into a groove record who plays it completely straight and makes it better.

The numbers are worth having straight. The single reached number 81 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the first week of January 1965, and the album got to number 25 on the Top LPs chart the same month. No Blue Note record had done that. Chrysler then used the tune in a television spot during the 1965 World Series without clearing it, Morgan found out the day after it aired, and the threat of a lawsuit got the ad pulled.

What the success cost him is the through line for everything below. Blue Note spent the next five years asking Morgan for another Sidewinder and shelving the records that were not one. He got a hit and lost control of his release schedule in the same transaction. The Library of Congress added the record to the National Recording Registry in 2024, which is a nice ending for the album and no ending at all for the story.

This is the best record Lee Morgan ever made and it sat in a vault for two and a half years. The session is February 15, 1964, eight weeks after The Sidewinder and months before The Sidewinder came out. Then the hit landed, Blue Note decided it needed more records that sounded like the hit, and this one went on the shelf until August 1966. The giveaway is the catalog number: 4169 belongs to early 1964 and was simply held.

The title track runs almost sixteen minutes and does not behave like a hard bop tune at all. It opens slow and unresolved, the horns floating over Reggie Workman, and the tempo never quite commits. Grant Green is the strangest and best decision on the date. Morgan almost never used a guitarist, and Green is not here to take choruses; he is here to smear color underneath Herbie Hancock and make the harmony ambiguous. Wayne Shorter was six months from writing Speak No Evil and you can hear where his head was.

"Mr. Kenyatta" is the one that gets sampled and covered, and "Melancholee" is the ballad where Morgan's tone does the work that his technique usually does. Nothing here is filler. Every piece is a Morgan original, which makes the two-year burial even harder to take.

Commercially it did nothing, reaching somewhere around number 125 on the Billboard 200 by the time it appeared in a market that had moved on. Artistically it is the record that answers the question of what Morgan would have done if nobody had asked him for another boogaloo. If you own one Lee Morgan album that is not The Sidewinder, own this one.

This is the album where the formula gets applied on purpose. One radio-friendly groove tune at the top of side one, four pieces of decent hard bop behind it, out the door. It did not work, and Blue Note released it promptly anyway, which tells you exactly what the label wanted from Morgan in 1965 and what it was prepared to sit on.

The great piece of trivia here is the title track's author. "The Rumproller" was written by Andrew Hill, the most abstract composer on the Blue Note roster, a man whose own records from the same eighteen months are close to unlistenable if you want a groove. Asked for a boogaloo, he wrote a very good one. That is either a joke or a day job, and it is funny either way.

Joe Henderson is back from The Sidewinder and is again the most interesting player on the record. Ronnie Mathews and Victor Sproles are the unfamiliar names, and they are fine rather than inspiring. "Eclipso" and "Desert Moonlight" are the tracks worth your time, both Morgan originals, both stronger than the tune the record is named after.

Collector notes. The whole LP comes from the April 21, 1965 date; an April 9 session with the same band produced "Venus di Mildew," which stayed in the can until the CD. Discogs dates the first mono pressing to December 1965 while most sources say 1966. And if you are buying an original, be aware that Plastylite ear stamps on this title are inconsistent between sides, so an ear on one side only is not automatically a red flag.

Recorded in the summer of 1965, released in 1968. Three years on a shelf, and by the time it came out Alfred Lion had retired, Blue Note had been sold to Liberty, and the label on the record no longer said New York USA. That is the whole Sidewinder problem in one object: a 4212 catalog number from 1965 wearing a Liberty jacket.

It deserved better. This is Morgan and Wayne Shorter for the second time in eighteen months, with Harold Mabern in the piano chair, and the title track is eleven minutes of the most relaxed playing on any of these records. Morgan sits back on the beat and lets it come to him. "Speedball" is the one that stuck; he was still calling it on stage at the Lighthouse five years later.

Two sessions made the album and the split matters. "Trapped" is the only keeper from June 25, a date where the band also attempted the title track, "A Stitch in Time" and "Yes I Can, No You Can't" and rejected all three. Everything else comes from July 1. "A Stitch in Time" was never salvaged.

The pressing situation is unusual. By 1968 Blue Note had stopped making commercial mono, so the BLP 4212 mono exists mainly as a radio promo rather than a real run, which makes it scarcer than the mono of a genuinely popular title like The Sidewinder. Originals were pressed at Columbia's Pitman plant, not Plastylite, so there is no ear to look for. It is currently in print in the Blue Note Classic Vinyl series.

Buy this one for "Ceora" and keep it for everything else. Six and a half minutes of bossa-tinted ballad, one of the loveliest tunes any hard bop trumpeter wrote, and now a standard that turns up at every jam session in the world. Morgan plays it without a single unnecessary note, which for a player who could always outrun the changes is the hardest thing he ever did.

The front line is the other reason. Hank Mobley and Jackie McLean were both Blue Note leaders with their own contracts, and getting the two of them on either side of Morgan for one afternoon is the kind of casting that only happened at that label in that decade. Herbie Hancock was in the Miles Davis quintet at the time and plays like it, comping with a harmonic looseness that keeps pulling the blues material sideways.

A personnel note. jazzdisco's session sheet marks McLean on three of the five titles, which makes "Ceora" and "Ill Wind" quintet performances without alto, and that matches what you hear: the ballads are lighter and more open than the blues. Wikipedia, Discogs and AllMusic all list him without qualification, so treat the track-level split as the more precise reading rather than a settled fact. The band also spent September 17 in the studio and rejected everything, so the album you own is a second-day record.

It waited sixteen months for release, appearing in January 1967 with the title track pushed as a follow-up single to The Sidewinder. It got to number 7 on the Billboard jazz chart and charted again in 1988 during the CD-era Blue Note revival. First stereo pressings carry New York labels and Van Gelder stampers; the very common second pressing says A Division of Liberty Records, which is the distinction to know before you pay original money.

Two records stapled together, and the seam shows. Four of the six tracks are a quintet date from May 27, 1966 with Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw and Billy Higgins. The other two, "Yesterday" and "Sunrise, Sunset," come from an April 8 session with an eleven-piece band arranged and conducted by Oliver Nelson. Every Morgan original on the album is quintet. Both of the orchestrated tracks are covers.

That is not an accident, it is the commercial brief made visible. A Beatles song from 1965 and a show tune from Fiddler on the Roof, dressed in Nelson charts, dropped into the middle of a perfectly good quintet record. This is Blue Note in 1966 reaching for a crossover audience the same way it reached for boogaloo singles, and it works about as well as you would guess.

The quintet material is genuinely good and gets overlooked because of the company it keeps. "Ca-Lee-So" and "Nite Flite" are strong Morgan writing, Henderson is in the form he was in on every Blue Note date that decade, and Tyner is the interesting choice, playing with a weight that neither Hancock nor Mabern brought to these sessions. Philly Joe Jones on the orchestra date is a rarity worth noting; he was not a Blue Note regular by then.

Three stars is a compromise rating for a compromised record. If you can find the CD with the four unissued Nelson big-band tracks restored, the Oliver Nelson album that Blue Note declined to release is sitting right there, and it is more interesting than the one that came out.

Recorded November 29, 1966. Released in 1985. Nineteen years, which is the longest gap in a discography full of them, and the only reason it came out at all is that Michael Cuscuna went through the Blue Note vaults in the mid-eighties and found the tapes.

The catalog number is the tell. BST 84426 was assigned retroactively when the record was finally issued, so there is no such thing as an original sixties pressing of The Rajah. Anything calling itself an original is a Capitol-era LP from 1984 or 1985, cut with Direct Metal Mastering, which is not what you want. This is the rare Blue Note where the modern reissue is unambiguously the better buy: the 2021 Tone Poet, mastered by Kevin Gray and pressed at RTI, came out on February 19, deliberately the anniversary of Morgan's murder.

The music is a straight-ahead quintet date in the Jazz Messengers manner, and the surprise is how little of it Morgan wrote. Only the title track is his. "A Pilgrim's Funny Farm" is Cal Massey, "Is That So" is Duke Pearson, "Davisamba" is Walter Davis Jr., and the last two are pop covers. For a leader who had been writing everything, handing over five of six slots says something about where his head was at the end of 1966.

Hank Mobley is the other reason to hear it. He and Morgan had been playing together off and on for ten years by this point and the front line has an unforced quality that the flashier pairings do not. Cedar Walton comps like a man who knows exactly how much space to leave. One source note: Discogs dates the first pressing to 1984 while Wikipedia says 1985, and nobody has settled it.

The first thing that matters about this record is who is standing next to Morgan. Bennie Maupin was more or less unknown in May 1968, and this is where the partnership starts that would carry through to the Lighthouse two years later. Maupin does not play like a hard bop tenor. He plays like someone who has been listening to what happened after Coltrane and has decided to bring it into a Blue Note quintet whether or not the material is ready for it.

The material is mostly not ready for it. All five tunes are Morgan's, all five are competent, and the title track is close enough to Eddie Harris's "Listen Here" that AllMusic called it derivative in print. Four years into being asked to write another hit, Morgan was clearly running low on ways to say yes.

"Suicide City" and "Helen's Ritual" are where the transitional quality shows through, and Cedar Walton is the pivot, comping in fourths and open voicings that push everything away from the blues. Reggie Workman had come out of the Coltrane band and plays like it. Billy Higgins does what Billy Higgins always does, which is make everyone else sound better.

Collector notes. The original 1968 jacket reads simply Caramba, without punctuation; the exclamation marks and the inverted Spanish opener arrived with later reissues. It came in a Unipak gatefold, which is a fragile format, so condition matters more than usual here. Labels read Blue Note, a division of Liberty Records, with Van Gelder stamped in both runouts. There was no vault gap on this one: cut in May, out by December.

Four performances, one per side, none of them written by Lee Morgan. Two are Jymie Merritt's, one is Harold Mabern's, one is Bennie Maupin's. For a man who had spent six years being told to write another hit, putting out a double album with none of his own tunes on it is not an oversight. It is a position.

The band had been working steadily and it sounds like it. "Absolutions" opens the record and runs nearly twenty minutes on a modal vamp that Merritt built for stretching, and Morgan plays over it with a freedom he never had inside a five-minute Blue Note track. Maupin switches between tenor, flute and bass clarinet. Mabern is relentless. This is Coltrane's influence arriving in Morgan's music about a decade after it arrived in everyone else's, and it suits him.

Three editions exist and they are very different records. The 1971 double LP has the four side-long pieces above. The 1996 three-CD expansion adds around a hundred minutes, including "Speedball" with Jack DeJohnette sitting in for Mickey Roker, a Lighthouse reading of "The Sidewinder," and a spoken introduction by Morgan. Then in August 2021 Blue Note issued The Complete Live at the Lighthouse, thirty-three performances from all twelve sets across eight CDs or twelve LPs, with over four hours never heard before, mastered by Kevin Gray.

Note that DeJohnette is not on the original album at all; every note of the 1971 release is Mickey Roker. If you only ever hear the four sides, you have the record Morgan approved. If you want the band, get the box.

The title is retroactive. The 1972 double LP was called simply Lee Morgan, his name and nothing else on the cover, and it only became The Last Session on the 1998 CD. Morgan cut it over two days in September 1971 and was shot and killed at Slugs' Saloon on February 19, 1972, before it reached the shops.

It is an octet, the largest band he ever led, and again he wrote none of it. Two tunes by Billy Harper, one each by Mabern, Merritt and Freddie Waits. Combine that with the Lighthouse album and the last two Lee Morgan records released contain not a single Lee Morgan composition, which is worth remembering the next time somebody files him under Sidewinder and moves on.

Billy Harper is the future in the room. His "Capra Black" takes up all of side one here and became the title track of his own debut album two years later; this is its first recording, and his tenor is the most forward-looking sound on the date. Bobbi Humphrey is the other hinge: she cut her first leader session for Blue Note about two weeks after this one and went on to be one of the label's biggest sellers of the seventies. Morgan had never used a flute like that before.

By 1971 Blue Note belonged to United Artists and the labels say so, with George Butler producing rather than Lion or Wolff. Van Gelder still engineered it. Morgan plays flugelhorn on "Angela" and trumpet elsewhere. It is not the best record on this page, but as a document of where he was heading it is the one that hurts the most.