The title track is almost sixteen minutes. That sounds like a lot for a commute. It is not, it is exactly right.
Everybody knows The Sidewinder. The groove, the hit, the record that bailed out Blue Note. Fewer people know he walked back into Van Gelder's studio less than two months later, on February 15, 1964, and cut something completely different: no boogaloo, no jukebox single, just a long, moody, searching record where every tune is his.
The band is stacked: Wayne Shorter on tenor, Herbie Hancock on piano, Grant Green on guitar, Reggie Workman on bass, Billy Higgins on drums. That is a sextet you build when you want to say something, not when you want a hit.
The title track opens with a slow, floating section. No steady beat yet. The horns and guitar just hang there. Then the band drops into time and the solos start, and every few minutes it pulls back into that floating part again. So the tune keeps resetting. Fifteen minutes and change and it never drags. Wayne Shorter's solo alone is worth the record.
Then Blue Note sat on it. The Sidewinder was selling, so Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff pulled this one off the release schedule and pushed Morgan back into the studio to make something closer to the hit. Search for the New Land stayed on the shelf until August 1966, more than two years after the session. That still bugs me. He made his most ambitious record and the reward was silence.
The rest of the album is not filler either. Mr. Kenyatta moves, The Joker swings hard, Melancholee is the pretty one, and Morgan the Pirate closes it. Grant Green gets a lot of room across the whole thing, and hearing him next to Herbie Hancock is really cool. They had recorded together before, on Green's Feelin' the Spirit and Hancock's My Point of View, but it is still an unusual pairing to find on a Lee Morgan date.
Why it works on a commute is simple. Long tunes reward not touching your phone. You put the title track on when you leave and you are somewhere else by the time it ends. No skipping, no shuffling.
The Sidewinder is the famous one. This is the deep one. If you only know Lee Morgan as the groove guy, this record fixes that in one listen. He was twenty five when he cut it, and it is pure artistry.
Wednesday morning, sixteen minutes, one tune. Done.