Blue Note is not spending a quiet evening at home for their 85th Anniversary. Among their many plans is the reactivation of the Blue Note Review, with the long-awaited Volume 3 devoted to trumpet legend Lee Morgan. While any number of artists would be excellent choices, Morgan is a particularly inspired selection. As I noted in my Instagram post yesterday, between shelved sessions, out-of-print titles, and sides that saw prior releases via Music Matters and other niche audiophile vinyl reissue shops, there’s a lot of excellent music to consider pairing with one of the most compelling yet tragic stories in jazz.
Lee Morgan’s body of work is vast and uniformly high quality; even those records that aren’t spellbinding or iconic (since he made more than one of each) range between really good and superb. This is saying a lot, considering Morgan’s entire career spanned roughly 16 years, from when he began recording/touring in earnest at age 18 to his murder at 33. During those years, he led 25 albums for Blue Note, lent his talents to dozens of others as a sideman, gigged relentlessly, and grew increasingly involved in political activism. His career was on a seemingly unstoppable arc of ascent in the late 50s until heroin took him out of the game for a couple of years. He roared back more powerfully than ever by the early 60s. His biggest claim to fame remains The Sidewinder—a game-changing, financial windfall for Blue Note Records but an artistic mixed blessing. The pressure/expectation of a repeat performance blunted some of Morgan’s more progressive aspirations which—combined with his prolific output in the mid/late 60s—created a dilemma for the execs at Blue Note. The marketplace and available resources had finite limits, so Morgan—along with several of his fellow Blue Note labelmates—had several of his best sessions vaulted for YEARS. When finally released,