BLP 4212

Lee Morgan - The Gigolo

Released - June 1968

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 25, 1965
Lee Morgan, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Harold Mabern, piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

1620 tk.3 Trapped

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, July 1, 1965 Lee Morgan, trumpet; Wayne Shorter, tenor sax; Harold Mabern, piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

1631 tk.3 The Gigolo
1632 tk.11 You Go To My Head
1633 tk.17 Yes I Can, No You Can't
1634 tk.32 Speedball

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Yes I Can, No You Can't	Lee Morgan	July 1 1965
Trapped	Wayne Shorter	June 25 1965
Speedball	Lee Morgan	July 1 1965
Side Two
The Gigolo	Lee Morgan	July 1 1965
You Go to My Head	J. Fred Coots, Haven Gillespie	July 1 1965

Liner Notes

WITH certain musicians I associate certain striking events. Sarah Vaughan scat singing at three in the morning at Minton's years ago. Sonny Stitt one night in a club long since disappeared suddenly stunning the audience, stilling all conversation, with a solo that literally turned heads. And Lee Morgan, not yet twenty at the time at Birdland in the late 1950's. He was in Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and although I'd heard about Lee from friends in Philadelphia, I'd never heard him play. The band was into A Night in Tunisia, and the arrangement had a long break — a cadenza really - in which Dizzy usually exploded into a musical equivalent of the Aurora Borealis. But that night, the thin, jaunty kid from Philadelphia took over that challenge, and in front of Dizzy himself, Lee split the sky, in a manner of speaking, of course. But the impact was such that you knew something had happened you’d never forget.

In the years after, and into now, Lee became one of my favorite musicians. I’m not talking analytically here because when I listen to music for myself not to write reviews — I don't listen analytically. Music for me is one of the indispensable joys of life, along with sex, wine, children, and tennis. My favorite musicians are those who make me feel, especially those who can make me feel good as well as vulnerable, sanguine as well a mortal. Thais why I loved Billie Holiday so much - she could make you feel like the first day of spring and also like it is having Christmas lunch alone in a self-service cafeteria. She had range.

What I’ve also dug about Lee is that he can plunge into blues, soar with crackling high spirits, and play his horn on a ballad as if it were a woman. All done with authority, with crispness, with a strong sense of self. And when Lee has a rhythm section that’s right for him — as in this album - the experience is as reinvigorating as that first taste after a long, gritty day. Lee has also become a writer who gets down to basic emotions, shapes, grooves. The opening Yes I Can, No You Can’t, for instance, which defies any listener to remain passive. How can you not move to it and with it? Wayne Shorter’s walloping solo is followed by the kind of crackling power I’ve mentioned as Lee constructs what I’d call a talking solo — the sort of conversation held with vehement ease and wit by someone who really has something to say and the equipment with which to say it. Harold Mabern gets down and stays with what even New York Times editorial writers call the nitty-gritty these days when they mean the core of it all.

Trapped is also Lee’s - bright, balmy. The outgoing kind of jazz I’d expect to hear In a park, if jazz were played more often in parks, as it ought to be. Jazz is not only music for night; I’ve seen kids respond to it in a playground as naturally as they respond to changes in the seasons. Jazz is elemental, that’s its strength, no matter how sophisticated it becomes. And if I were running a local school system, I’d have musicians like Lee come around occasionally. Not necessarily to lecture or do a jazz version of show-and-tell. But just to let the kids enjoy themselves, to let them move freely. Anyway, the tune and the performance are also restorative of the spirit. I catalogue records by moods rather than names and I’ve already figured this one goes “the section for albums I know will instantly get daily hang-ups out of my head to be replaced by intimations of joy.

Of similar ebullient value is the quick-stepping, neatly liberating Speed Ball. Dig how relaxed Wayne Shorter is in this setting. it’s impossible not to be. Lee again comes on with that persistently satisfying clarity of articulation, that combination of technique and ideas and feelings which proclaim that everything’s together. I haven’t mentioned the fundamental importance of Billy Higgins to the relaxed, powerful flow of these proceedings. I know a lot of hornmen who look forward to a chance to play with Billy because they know he’ll make it easy for them to do their own thing - deeply easy. Because Billy listens and responds and has to use an ineffable word. taste, Listen to his breaks here.

The long title track which starts the second side, The Gigolo, is the fourth original by Lee on this set. Here the mood is more reflective, more questioning, than on the other tracks - an intriguing theme, interestingly developed. Harold Mabern's solo is fluent but also lyrically evocative. (On this track, as on the others, it’s worth listening one or more times just to follow Bob Cranshaw’s resilient bass line.) In his first solo, Lee brightens the mood, and again, it’s exhilarating to hear how the man handles his horn — quick, sure strokes; a remarkable command of improvisatory direction; and above all, a continually buoyant momentum. Dark in tone, heavier, probing, Wayne Shorter follows with a solo that is full of the “cry” of jazz — that voice from way inside that speaks of and for one man in this time and in this place. Jazz as who you are, what you feel, right now! And that is what Lee, of course, is all about too as he closes the odyssey of The Gigolo.

Finally. You Go To My Head, a ballad of discovery and expectation, played by Lee and his colleagues with a firm sense of the essence of the song and of themselves. That part of themselves which still believes in the perfectibility of what can happen between a man and a woman, no matter what they’ve known in the past. It is also, I should add, a classic illustration of the art of highly personal, disciplined improvisation which lets each man tell his own story without distorting the song.

Every once in a while an album comes along, and this is one of them, that is beyond what is currently fashionable at any given time. It’s the kind of set you know - by the way you feel - will never be dated. It’s basic music, basic jazz, basic Lee Morgan. It has the freshness of real spontaneity, the force of experience, and the quintessential joy of extending yourself into and through an instrument so that the music adds to the continuum of your life, your work, your emotions. This set is a solid addition to the body of Lee Morgan’s work - the product of a craftsman who goes beyond craft to discovery.

-NAT HENTOFF

Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design by FORLENZA VENOSA ASSOCIATES
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT THE GIGOLO

Nat Hentoff was right on target when he predicted that The Gigolo would come to be regarded as a timeless session. Many Lee Morgan fans have cited the album as one of the trumpeter's best, and it indeed features inspired playing on a superior program of music. It has also won a special place in listeners' hearts because, as Hentoff could not have known at the time, it represents the final recorded example of one of the greatest trumpet/tenor sax front lines in jazz history.

Morgan and Wayne Shorter first joined forces in the summer of 1959 in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, where their combination of fire, feeling, wit, and iconoclasm made instant magic, For the next two years (until Blakey added trombonist Curtis Fuller to the band shortly before Morgan's departure), their conjoined sound defined one of the greatest periods in Jazz Messenger music on a series of Blue Note albums, As the leading voices in a quintet, they were also featured on albums at the time under the leadership of Wynton Kelly and Shorter (on Vee Jay), and on Morgan's own release for Roulette. The Morgan/Shorter partnership on Blue Note, on hiatus for a period while the trumpeter battled personal demons, was reestablished in 1964 and continued intermittently through 1967. Most of these later encounters involved sextet instrumentations, as on Morgan's Search for the New Land and The Procrastinator, and Blakey's Indestructible; but Night Dreamer (Shorter's first date as leader for the label), as well as the present sessions, gave us two more quintet gems.

Taken together, Night Dreamer and The Gigolo confirm that Morgan and Shorter remained eminently compatible despite developments in their respective careers that seemed to find them headed in separate directions. Morgan was enjoying his greatest commercial success with his funky blues hit "The Sidewinder," recorded at the end of 1963, while Shorter was focused on more open and exploratory material as the new member and primary composer in Miles Davis's quintet, which he joined in the summer of '64. Yet Morgan displays no hesitation in dealing with Shorter's haunting compositions on Night Dreamer, and the music there anticipates ideas Morgan would pursue in his own bands at the end of the decade. Shorter is similarly assured here, in what even at the time were considered the more traditional contours of the present music.

One major change that had taken place since the pair first met was Morgan's growing focus on composition. Unlike his early albums (1956-60), in which the vast majority of the writing was left to others, Morgan's Blue Note dates of the '60s tended to focus heavily and sometimes exclusively on the trumpeter's own creations. His compositions here define a style that, white narrower and more familiar than that of Shorter, encompassed a range of forms and feelings. "Speedball" is most famous of the originals (it quickly became Morgan's theme in live performances) and the most straightahead, and it includes a 16-bar interlude/coda that is as memorable as the primary 12-bar blues melody. The other two Morgan originals hark back to earlier works by the trumpeter without sounding like mere echoes. "Yes I Can, No You is Can't" is clearly fashioned in the mood of "The Sidewinder," but employs a different chorus structure and some of its own harmonic wrinkles, "The Gigolo," heard here in two takes, brings the open 6/8 feel of Morgan's "Search for the New Land" into a structured chorus with a bridge, resulting in a form that recalls a contemporary Freddie Hubbard composition, "Blue Spirits" (from the Blue Note album of the same name). Each of Morgan's pieces contains a melody that stays in the listener's ear, the true sign of an accomplished writer.

The arrangement (unaccredited) of "You Go to My Head" has also become a classic, and remade the standard for many subsequent musicians, in the way that John Coltrane did when he recast "Body and Soul" in 1960. Note also that "Trapped," the only issued performance from the first of the album's two sessions, was listed as Morgan's composition at the time of release but is actually a Wayne Shorter opus. It might be described as a patterned blues, with ensemble choruses that underscore the rich blends the trumpeter and saxophonist achieved with regularity.

Little need be added regarding the excellent performances here of the primary horns and the rhythm section. This was a highly compatible group, with each musician at the top of his game and clearly inspired by his partners. Morgan, Mabern, and Higgins had made similar magic earlier in June 1965 on Hank Mobley's Dippin', another title available in an RVG Edition.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2005