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Lee Morgan – Volume 2: Sextet – Blue Note 1542
by Marc Davis
No one ever bought a record for its weird song titles. (And if they did, Iron Butterfly's psychedelic rock classic In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida would be the best seller of all time.) But still, Lee Morgan Volume 2: Sextet deserves some kind of award in that category. First, there are two songs written by virtual unknown Owen Marshall. “Her Sister" makes you wonder two things: Whose sister? And what is she like? Sexy? Mysterious? Cool? Hard to tell from this tune, ...
Continue ReadingLee Morgan Indeed! – Blue Note 1538
by Marc Davis
The first time Lee Morgan entered a recording studio, he was just 18 years old and he was leading his own band. More impressive, that band included soon-to-be-legendary pianist Horace Silver and drummer Philly Joe Jones. This is the CD of that 1956 recording session. While the players were great, the music is merely ordinary--which isn't too surprising given the tender age of the leader. Indeed! is standard Blue Note hard bop by the guys who would, in ...
Continue ReadingLee Morgan: Search for the New Land
by Matt Marshall
Lee Morgan Search for the New Land Blue Note / Music Matters 2009 (1964)
Backed by what may have been his most emphatically modern group, trumpeter Lee Morgan did indeed set out on an exploratory quest in this follow-up to his smash, hard bop gem, The Sidewinder (Blue Note, 1964). The title track, which kicks off the album, is more in-line with the music saxophonist John Coltrane was making at the time--a spiritual, meditative ...
Continue ReadingLee Morgan: Tom Cat
by Matt Marshall
Lee Morgan Tom Cat Blue Note / Music Matters 2008 (1980)
Tom Cat continues Music Matter's program of re-releasing generally unavailable Blue Note sessions from the 1950s and 1960s on 45-rpm vinyl double albums. As Michael Cuscuna explains in the liner notes from the original 1980 release, Tom Cat was the victim of trumpeter Lee Morgan's unexpected crossover hit with The Sidewinder (Blue Note, 1964), which made the pop 100 charts. In the wake ...
Continue ReadingDelightfuLee: The Life and Music of Lee Morgan
by Larry Reni Thomas
DelightfuLee: The Life and Music of Lee Morgan Jeffrey McMillan Cloth/Paper; 272 pages ISBN: 978-0-472-11502-0/978-0-472-03281-5 University of Michigan Press 2008
This is an excellent, well-written, abundantly researched, scholarly book on the life and music of one of the great, unheralded heroes of jazz--the trumpeter Lee Morgan--who was shot and killed at Slug's Jazz Club in Manhattan in 1972, at the tender age of 33 years, by his 47 ...
Continue ReadingLee Morgan: Lee Morgan
by Samuel Chell
Were it not for the mature and ceaselessly lyrical contributions of tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley, this RVG remaster of an eponymous 1956 Lee Morgan date (subtitled, on the backside of the album, Volume 2: Sextet) would appeal only to Morgan completists. The trumpeter's early Blue Note recordings and meteoric rise have already been documented by a number of distinguished Morgan reissues--City Lights, The Cooker, Tom Cat, The Gigolo--coinciding with the 35th anniversary of the gifted player's premature, shocking end. Only ...
Continue ReadingLee Morgan: Vols. 2 and 3
by Joel Roberts
Lee Morgan was just 18 when he led these exemplary hard bop dates for Blue Note in the winter of 1956 and spring of 1957. But, as these newly remastered Rudy Van Gelder editions attest, the Philadelphia-born trumpet phenom was mature far beyond his years, with a hard-driving, take-no-prisoners style that gained the attention of band leaders like Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie, both of whom hired the precocious teen when he was barely out of school.
Lee Morgan
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