The eight-CD/12-LP collection from Blue Note reveals the artistic growth and evolving musical ideas of Lee Morgan, a gifted trumpeter who died at age 33
Trumpeter Lee Morgan’s life in music has been overshadowed by the circumstances of his death—at age 33, in 1972, after his common-law wife shot him outside a downtown Manhattan jazz club. But Morgan was still a teenager when jazz giants Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey recruited him to join their bands, and he later played in the great 1959-61 edition of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.
Yet tribute recordings devoted to Morgan are few and far between, and Kasper Collin’s 2016 film, “I Called Him Morgan,” dwelt as much on his killer as it did on the trumpeter. This long neglect may now change with the release of “The Complete Live at The Lighthouse” , an eight-CD/12-LP collection of the music from Morgan’s only official live recording. Drawn from 12 sets of music performed in July 1970 at a storied Hermosa Beach, Calif.
A Morgan solo always made you sit up and take notice. Dramatic, dynamic and ambitious, his tone was big and brash on finger-popping, uptempo numbers, yet warm and tender on ballads. Trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas wrote to me in an email about Morgan, “ Horace Silver pointed out to me the supreme hipness of Lee Morgan’s voice, not what he plays over one chord, but how he gets from one to the next.” Morgan was always willing to take risks, bending notes and adding variations to the themes.
The rendition of “The Sidewinder” on “The Complete Live at The Lighthouse” sounds more exuberant than obligatory, and it feels like a gleeful nod to the ’60s, while much of the other material points to the future. Led by Roker’s frenetic drumming, Mabern’s “The Beehive” roars with intensity and gusto, and it bridges the gap between the hard bop of the ’60s and the longer solos and more open structures that were a trademark of some ’70s jazz. Mr.
Hits like “The Sidewinder” notwithstanding, jazz lost a chunk of its audience in the ’60s, and by 1970, the genre was also in the throes of seismic change—with both jazz-rock fusion and the avant garde establishing a substantial presence in the genre’s mainstream. Morgan was busy adding elements of these innovations to his sound.
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