BLP 4169

Lee Morgan - Search for the New Land

Released - July 1966

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, February 15, 1964
Lee Morgan, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Herbie Hancock, piano; Grant Green, guitar; Reggie Workman, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

1304 tk.3 Mr. Kenyatta
1305 tk.5 Search For The New Land
1306 tk.10 The Joker
1307 tk.14 Morgan The Pirate
1308 tk.16 Melancholee

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Search for the New Land	Lee Morgan	15 February 1964
The Joker	Lee Morgan	15 February 1964
Side Two
Mr. Kenyatta	Lee Morgan	15 February 1964
Melancholee	Lee Morgan	15 February 1964
Morgan the Pirate	Lee Morgan	15 February 1964

Liner Notes

WHEN Lee Morgan first burst onto the New York jazz scene in the mid-1950’s, I was struck by the particularly clear relationship between the young trumpeter’s musical style and his style off the stand. Like his playing, Lee was brisk, witty and strutting with confidence. Underneath the often mocking way of talking there was also, however, a very clear awareness on his part of the distance he still had to go. He listened hard to everything going on around him, and he was quite lucid in verbalizing his goals. Among those goals were greater clarity of line and depth of emotion.

“I always played a lot of notes,” Lee told British writer Valerie Wilmer in 1961, “and now I’m getting space and those long lines. You want a change of sound, like trying to play little songs on a song, and that kind of thing. Miles is a beautiful example of simplicity but that’s not what I want. I want to play all over the horn and have a big beautiful sound.”

In the early 1960’s, Lee was developing along those lines, and it was intriguing to hear him gradually discipline his formidable technical command toward more diversified expressive ends. Then Lee went through a period of relative inactivity on the jazz scene until he reappeared once more in New York in the summer of 1963. Now, Lee is recording again for Blue Note (The Sidewinder, BLUE NOTE 4157 BLP4157, preceded this session). And, shortly after the tunes in Search For The New Land were cut on February 15, 1964, Lee went back on the road with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with whom he had been previously.

Listening to the renascent Lee Morgan in these performances recalls a statement Lee made a few years ago when somebody congratulated him on his style. “I don’t think I have a completely original style,” he said candidly at the time, “though I do have an identity. An identity is when someone who knows jazz can say ‘that’s Lee Morgan playing’, but my basic style is composed of a strong Fats Navarro/Clifford Brown influence, and Miles and Dizzy, and then again a Bud and Bird thing. I think o definite style comes with living and experience and traveling until you play what you are, you play yourself on the horn.”

The Lee Morgan identify remains strong, and on the basis of his work here, the Lee Morgan style is indeed becoming definite. There is also the evolving capacity of Lee Morgan as a composer. All of !he pieces in this set are by Lee and they demonstrate that his writing, like his playing, is taking on a former, more personal shape.

Search For The New Land opens with an affectingly lyrical theme which is more reflective than used to be customary of Lee’s work. The once cocky, exuberant youngster to whom everything seemed to come so easily has clearly been doing some reappraising. The thoughtfulness endemic to the mood of the piece ¡s also marked in Wayne Shorter’s solo, one of his most restrainedly eloquent statements on recent records. Lee himself still plays with the crisp clarity of his earlier work, but there is an added poignancy in his tone and what once used to be rushing freshets of notes are now shaped into a carefully balanced distillation of mood. Sustaining the ruminative pace and aura of the number are Grant Green’s glowing solo and the sensitively shaded, lucent contribution of Herbie Hancock. With Reggie Workman and Billy Higgins keeping an airy beat going throughout, the performance as a whole is suffused with an almost pastoral sense of space and lack of pressure which is not at all common to today’s jazz.

The Joker is more outgoing, but here too, an unhurried atmosphere prevails. The music swings with an ambling ease and the solos are softly sunny. There ¡s a collective good feeling which is unaffectedly buoyant without being in the least swaggering.

Mr. Kenyatta, with its staccato propulsiveness, leads into a demonstration that Lee has lost none of the incisive zest that always identified his music; but again, the zeal is more cohesively structured than often used to be the case. Also heated but disciplined are the improvisations by Shorter, Green and Hancock. I don’t know whether the piece is also meant to reflect the shift in stance of Jomo Kenyatta himself, now that the leader of Kenya wields official power, but Mr. Kenyatta does reflect the fusion of force with control. Worth noting in Lee’s second appearance on the track, incidentally, is the increasingly effective use of textural changes in his playing. The notes continue to flow with cleanly articulated facility, but each note now appears more carefully shaded in terms of the solo’s overall design.

Melancholee, as the title promises, is an evocation of ruefulness. The theme is disarmingly simple and is so well conceived that it has the shape of inevitability. Lee’s solo, emphosizing the growing body of his tone, is phrased with a maturity of structural sense as well as of feeling that underlines the distance Lee has traveled toward being able to “play yourself on the horn". Complementing Morgan with their own directly personal stories are Green, Hancock and Shorter in what turns out to be an exceptionally well integrated, cumulatively moving ballad performance.

Morgan The Pirate is a reaffirmation that the youthful Morgan élan is still very much in evidence. One of the elements in Lee’s playing which has always been particularly engaging is the sense he projects of the sheer fun of improvising, the pleasure of making an instrument an extension of yourself. And now that he is able to feel and say more emotionally with a technique that is already so secure, his thrust of delight at being able to thoroughly command his horn is all the more heightened.

At the beginning of his career, Lee Morgan was impressive in terms of the carefree ebullience of his spirit and his often dazzling technique. To this listener, the current Lee Morgan is more impressive because in the past eight years, Lee has considerably expanded his knowledge about himself; and consequently, his music encompasses a broader and, I feel, a deeper range of emotions. The ebullience often reasserts itself, but it has been tempered with an awareness of the shadows as well as the kicks of being part of this complexly demanding era. The technique is more fluid than it ever was, but it is no longer indulged in for its own careening sake. My point is that the Lee Morgan identity has become a great deal clearer to him and at the same time, the need to fully communicate that identity through his music is enabling him to forge an increasing unmistakable and resourceful style. As his searching continues, he is likely to find more and more new lands.

—NAT HENTOFF

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT SEARCH FOR THE NEW LAND

This album was a victim of its timing. It was Lee Morgan's second date as a leader after an absence from the recording scene of nearly two years, and followed his return opus The Sidewinder by two months. Like its predecessor, Search announced a new maturity in Morgan the trumpeter, as well as a compositional talent that had been displayed only rarely in the sessions he led during his initial period of activity (1956-61). Both recordings featured Morgan's writing exclusively, played by casts of equally talented supporting players. The major difference was that, in the funky blues that served as The Sidewinder's title track, Morgan had one of jazz's rare crossover hits.

Faced with this unexpected success, which continued to build through 1964 and '65 until "The Sidewinder" found itself as a soundtrack to an automobile commercial, (something of a commonplace for classic jazz tracks these days, but unheard of in the age of the Beatles), Blue Note changed its plan for future Morgan releases. Both the present date and a sextet session from August 1964 were put aside while Morgan was brought back to Rudy Van Gelder's studios in April 1965 to cut The Rumproller. This last album was clearly designed to serve as a Sidewinder sequel in its quintet instrumentation, use of tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, and long-metered title blues. Search For The New Land was not released for another year — months after it had been pictured in ads and on inner sleeves — while the August '64 sextet remained unissued for 15 years, finally emerging under the title Tom Cat.

Morgan was not the only Blue Note artist, or the only jazz artist affected by The Sidewinder. A variety of leaders at this and other labels, particularly in the populist camp but also more than one of the period's experimenters, were now called upon to include a danceable blues with a catchy vamp on their albums, preferably as title tracks. Search For The New Land argues that Morgan could have also pursued the more open and visionary directions heard in the subsequent recordings of Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, to take two examples from the present personnel; but success is hard to ignore, particularly for someone like Morgan who had scuffled so recently yet now was presented with a rare opportunity to build a large audience. So the trumpeter spent much of the '60s attempting to re-create The Sidewinder. He ventured occasionally into the moods heard here, as on The Procrastinator from 1967, which also features Shorter, Hancock and drummer Billy Higgins, but that date remained unissued for a decade. Only in the two years before Morgan's death in 1972, on Live At The Lighthouse and his eponymous final album (reissued as Lee Morgan-The Last Session), did he again focus on the harmonic openness and extended blowing of this disc's title track. By then, the presence of electric piano and electric bass gave the music a significantly different feeling.

This helps to explain why Search For The New Land, as musically successful an album as any in Morgan's discography, tends to get overlooked. It certainly conveys a wistfulness and lyricism not always associated with the trumpeter, both in the writing ("Search" and "Melancholee" in particular) and the playing. The title track is especially memorable for the clarion power of Morgan and the ever-surprising Hancock, whose solo suggests an impressionistic version of McCoy Tyner. Grant Green is taken furthest from his usual realm on these performances, and acquits himself with restraint and admirable clarity, while Shorter, Reggie Workman and Higgins sustain the inside/outside balance for which they were already well known. The album is also notable for including two historic jazz tandems: Morgan and Shorter, a winning pair since their days with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, and Shorter and Hancock, who would begin their historic collaboration in the Miles Davis band later in 1964.

Taken together with his work on such contemporary recordings as Grachan Moncur III's Evolution and Shorter's Night Dreamer, the title track in particular demonstrates that Morgan was more than capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with the progressive voices on Blue Note's roster. Had The Sidewinder been withheld and for some reason Search For The New Land served to announce Morgan's return, the trumpeter might even have pursued such a course. As it happened, Morgan explored new paths on the occasions when they were presented to him, while staying for the most part on the hard-bop/soul path that (however briefly) lifted him commercially out of the jazz ghetto. While we may mourn the paucity of more music like Search For The New Land in Morgan's discography, we should definitely celebrate the album's visionary beauty and emotional depth.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003

75th Anniversary CD Reissue Liner Notes

Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder, recorded in December 1963 and released in July 1964, changed Lee Morgan's life and the fortunes of Blue Note Records forever. Although neither Alfred Lion nor Lee Morgan expected this album to be more popular than his previous albums, it proved to be a massive hit.

On February 15, 194, Morgan recorded an exceptional album with Wayne Shorter, Grant Green, Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman and Billy Higgins. The title was "Search For The New Land" and its catalog number BLP4169 indicated that it would probably be released about six months after The Sidewinder." But as "The Sidewinder" continued to sell in huge numbers, Blue Note decided to shelve this session and an equally brilliant session done in August which eventually came out in 1979 as "Tom Cat." They waited until Lee could go in the studio the following April to record "The Rumproller," a like minded sequel to "The Sidewinder."

While "Tom Cat" got lost in the shuffle, "Search For The New Land" was finally released in July 1966, two and a half years after it was recorded. And it was worth the wait. As Dan Morgenstern wrote in his October 5, 1966 Down Beat review of the album, "This album contains excellent writing - all the tunes are Morgan originals - as well as flashes of truly musical and imaginative playing..."

- MICHAEL CUSCUNA