Jazz Articles about Lee Morgan

Lee Morgan: The Gigolo

by Chris May
February 18, 2006

Hard bop's baddest trumpeter, Lee Morgan, may never quite have topped his iconic '63 masterpiece, The Sidewinder, but he came pretty damn close on a couple of occasions. The Gigolo is one of them, and it's been reissued as part of the ongoing Rudy Van Gelder remaster series. The album's menacing, visceral vibe has never sounded more powerful or engaging.

With The Sidewinder ringing cash registers across the US and Europe, there was a temptation for Morgan and Blue Note ...

McCoy Tyner: Tender Moments

by Donald Elfman
May 18, 2005

Now 66 years old, McCoy Tyner has made countless albums and become an elder statesman of jazz. He is certainly best known as the pianist in the transformational John Coltrane Quartet of the '60s, but it was with Blue Note recordings like this one from 1967, recently reissued in remastered form, that he revealed his personality as a composer, arranger, and soloist.Tender Moments was one of Tyner's first major explorations of the world of colors and textures available ...

Wayne Shorter: Night Dreamer

by John Kelman
March 22, 2005

By the time he made this recording, a few short months before he was to join Miles Davis' groundbreaking second quintet, saxophonist Wayne Shorter had already earned a reputation as a player combining heady intellectualism with a more visceral approach as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He'd also released four records for the Vee-Jay label that demonstrated how, while he'd learned a great deal with Blakey, he was developing his own voice, albeit still in the hard bop ...

McCoy Tyner: Tender Moments

by Norman Weinstein
August 25, 2004

This is the first, and arguably, the finest big band album the distinguished pianist ever recorded. Six horns are utilized, with the neglected James Spaulding alternating on flute and alto sax along with tenor saxophonist Bennie Maupin, trombonist Julian Priester, trumpeter Lee Morgan, and the exotic horns, with Bob Northern on French horn and Howard Johnson on tuba. There are six Tyner originals gracing the frustratingly brief album (38 minutes). But repeated listening reveals something very subtle and seductive about ...

Lee Morgan: Sonic Boom

by Germein Linares
January 20, 2004

A quick inspection of the Lee Morgan discography unearths an obscure album sandwiched between 1966's The Rajah and 1967's The Procrastinator. The album, Sonic Boom, was recorded in 1967 yet remained silent in the Blue Note vaults for twelve years, resurfacing only twice, as an LP in 1979 and eleven years later as a CD. Both times, exposure to the public was brief, making Sonic Boom nearly irrelevant in the trumpeter's overall anthology. Yet the music here is nothing short ...

Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Hank Mobley: The Birth Of Hard Bop

by Jim Santella
September 1, 2000

This 2-CD set, introducing the Savoy Jazz Rare Sessions series, contains the reissue of four 1956 Savoy albums: The Jazz Message Of Hank Mobley, Hard Bop, The Jazz Message Of Hank Mobley, Volume 2 and A-1: The Savoy Sessions. It includes alternate takes and previously unissued tracks that serve an important purpose. Here, “Cattin’," for example, is played at different tempos: Bird-like on the alternate take with different featured soloists. The version originally issued is looser and more representative of ...

Various: The Birth Of Hard Bop

by AAJ Staff
July 1, 2000

Strangely enough, The Birth Of Hard Bop contains in its liner notes a polemic against the genesis and continuation of that term. Even more strangely, it seems that reissue producer Orrin Keepnews read Doug Ramsey's reasoned but disputatious discussion of hard bop's meaning and participants, but he let the draft stand as is without editing. Keepnews seems faintly embarrassed by Ramsey's straightforwardness, but then he joins in by endorsing Ramsey's point: that “hard bop" is a subgenre concocted by critics ...