The train was packed and I had Lee Morgan in my ears. The Sidewinder. The title track. It runs almost ten and a half minutes and I let the whole thing ride.
That opening bass line does the work. Bob Cranshaw just locks in and walks. Then Billy Higgins on the drums, easy and steady, and you are already moving. By the time Morgan comes in on trumpet you are nodding along whether you meant to or not.
This is a midweek record. Hear me out.
The middle of the week is the slog. You are not fresh anymore and the weekend is still far off. You do not want anything heavy. You want a groove that keeps you upright. The Sidewinder is exactly that. It is funky without trying too hard. It swings without asking anything of you.
Here is the thing about this record. Blue Note was struggling when it came out. The label needed a hit. Morgan recorded the session on December 21, 1963, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs. Blue Note BLP 4157. It came out in 1964 and it sold. It became the best selling record Blue Note had ever put out. It bailed them out.
So they spent years chasing it. Half the Blue Note records after this one open with some boogaloo number trying to be the next Sidewinder. Most of them are fine. None of them are this.
The band is loaded. Joe Henderson on tenor. Barry Harris on piano. Cranshaw on bass and Higgins on drums. Henderson is the secret here. His solo on the title track is loose and a little weird and it never sits where you expect. He pushes against the groove instead of just riding it. That tension is what keeps the tune from being background music.
Morgan was 25 when he cut this. He had already been around. He played in Dizzy Gillespie's big band as a teenager. He was on Coltrane's Blue Train. He had range. The Sidewinder gets called a soul jazz record and it is, but Morgan could play anything and you hear that even on a groove tune.
The rest of the album holds up too. People skip past it because the title track is the famous one, but Totem Pole is great and Gary's Notebook has real bite. Still, for a commute, you press play on track one and that is the whole job done.
I keep this one in rotation for mornings when I do not have it in me to think hard. You do not analyze The Sidewinder. You just let it carry you to your stop.
There is a reason it became a standard. The melody is simple. Anybody can hum it. The groove is built to last. Sixty years later it still works on a crowded train at eight in the morning, which is about the highest praise I can give a record.
If you have never sat with the full version, do that. Not the radio edit. The whole ten and a half minutes. Put it on, look out the window, and let it ride.