Lee Morgan
Blue Note put him in the studio at eighteen and he made ten records before he turned twenty-three. Then he cut “The Sidewinder” in one afternoon in December 1963, gave the label the biggest seller it had ever had, and spent the rest of his career being asked to do it again. The records that were not another Sidewinder went into the vault, one of them for nineteen years. By 1970 he had a working band, a modal book he mostly did not write, and the best playing of his life on tape at a club in Hermosa Beach. He was shot and killed at Slugs’ Saloon in February 1972, at thirty-three. Twenty albums across two eras. Browse below.
Browse by Era
The split is the hit. Everything before December 1963 is a young trumpet player making hard bop records on a normal schedule; everything after is a musician negotiating with his own best seller. Both pages run in recording order, which on the second one is nothing like release order. Every review carries personnel details, session dates and catalog numbers, Apple Music audio previews, track listings, and album art.
Ten records made before his twenty-third birthday. The Blue Note debut cut at eighteen with Horace Silver and Philly Joe Jones, the Savoy date that is really a Hank Mobley session with Morgan’s name on the sleeve, the Benny Golson-written Vol. 3, and the two peaks of the run, The Cooker and Candy. Then two Vee-Jay dates with Art Blakey and the Blue Note return, Lee-Way, with Jackie McLean.
Ten records and one long argument with a hit single. The Sidewinder, then Search for the New Land shelved for two and a half years because it did not sound like it. Cornbread and “Ceora,” the Oliver Nelson charts on Delightfulee, The Rajah lost in the vault until 1985, and the last two albums, Live at the Lighthouse and the final session, on which he wrote nothing at all.
The Sidewinder also has its own short-form column in the Liner Notes section: the boogaloo hit that Blue Note could not stop chasing. Morgan also turns up as a sideman elsewhere on the site, most prominently across the Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers reviews.
Twenty albums is not the whole catalogue. Still to come as leader dates: Dizzy Atmosphere (Specialty, 1957), Take Twelve (Jazzland, 1962), Tom Cat (recorded 1964, issued 1980), Infinity (1965, issued 1981), Charisma (1966, issued 1969), Standards (1967, issued 1998), Sonic Boom (1967, issued 1979), The Sixth Sense (1967, issued 1970), Taru (1968, issued 1980) and The Procrastinator (1967 and 1969, issued 1978).
Lee Morgan, 1938 to 1972
Edward Lee Morgan was born July 10, 1938, in Philadelphia. His sister Ernestine gave him his first trumpet on his thirteenth birthday, and he was leading his own band around the city while still in his teens. He turned eighteen in July 1956. By November he had recorded his first album for Blue Note, and he joined the Dizzy Gillespie big band the same year, staying about eighteen months until Gillespie could no longer afford to keep the band together in 1958.
He went straight into Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, where he stayed until 1961 and played on Moanin’, the record that made the band’s name. Benny Golson had recruited him. Those years are the reason a lot of people know his sound without knowing it is his.
Heroin took the early 1960s from him. He left the Messengers, went back to Philadelphia, and made almost no records between the autumn of 1960 and the beginning of 1963. He came back to New York, cleaned up with help from Blakey and others, and in December 1963 cut The Sidewinder.
What followed is the strange part of the story. The record sold like nothing Blue Note had released, and the label responded by asking for more of the same and shelving the sessions that were not. Search for the New Land, his best album, waited until 1966. The Gigolo waited three years. The Rajah waited nineteen and only surfaced because Michael Cuscuna found the tapes in the vault in the mid-eighties.
By the late sixties he had a steady working band with Bennie Maupin, Harold Mabern, Jymie Merritt and Mickey Roker, and his music had turned modal and long-form. He was also one of the leaders of the Jazz and People’s Movement, which demonstrated during the taping of television talk and variety shows through 1970 and 1971 to protest how rarely jazz musicians were booked on them.
In the early hours of February 19, 1972, between sets at Slugs’ Saloon in the East Village, Morgan was shot by his live-in partner Helen Moore after an altercation. Heavy snow had made the city almost undriveable, the ambulance was slow arriving, and he bled to death. He was thirty-three years old.