LT-1058

Lee Morgan - Tom Cat

Released - 1980

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 11, 1964
Lee Morgan, trumpet; Curtis Fuller, trombone; Jackie McLean, alto sax; McCoy Tyner, piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.7 Exotique
tk.8 Tom Cat
tk.14 Twice Around
tk.29 Rigormortis (aka Riggormortes)
tk.35 Twilight Mist

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Tom Cat	Morgan	August 11 1964
Exotique	Morgan	August 11 1964
Side Two
Twice Around	Morgan	August 11 1964
Twilight Mist	Tyner	August 11 1964
Riggarmortes	Morgan	August 11 1964

Liner Notes

LEE MORGAN

At the age of 18, Lee Morgan was playing in Dizzy Gillespie's big band and making his first album as a leader for Blue Note. In the summer of 1961, having just turned 23 and with 7 albums on Blue Note and 2 on Vee Jay to his credit and after a fruitful three and one half year stint with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, this renowned trumpet star slipped quietly from the limelight to his hometown Philadelphia to sort out his personal problems, the most significant of which was heroin addiction.

At the end of 1963, Lee was ready to re-enter the scene and pick up where he had left off. In November, he appeared on Grachan Moncur's Evolution and Hank Mobley's No Room For Squares. In December, he recorded a new album for Blue Note (The Sidewinder) and again in February, 1964 a second session (Search For The New Land). While he was waiting for these albums to be issued, he sat idly in a resident hotel in New York. In April and May, the Messengers recorded one of their finest albums Indestructable with Lee back in the band. 1964 was a year of many personnel changes for the Blakey organization; Lee and Curtis Fuller remained the only constants.

On August 11, Lee went back into the studio to record this session Tom Cat, issued here for the first time. Blakey, who had stopped doing sideman recording dates in early 1962, was willing to do this one for Lee.

Meanwhile, The Sidewinder was released. As the story goes, neither Lee nor Alfred Lion of Blue Note plotted musically for a smash. In fact, the company issued only about 4000 copies upon release. Needless to say, they ran out of stock in three or four days. And The Sidewinder became a runaway smash, making the pop 100 charts. It was heard on juke boxes, AM stations, as a theme for television shows and even on a Chrysler automobile ad on TV. Jazz had its first crossover hit.

The result was a considerable amount of rethinking by Blue Note and a certain amount of pressure applied to them from their distributors to come up with more of the same. Search For The New Land and Tom Cat were shelved temporarily, while Morgan returned to the studio to try for a follow-up, which was Andrew Hill's The Rumproller. Search was eventually issued a few years later, but Tom Cat was somehow forgotten.

Yet this is one of Lee's finest sessions with a superb cast and some of the man's best writing. From his earliest to his last days, the trumpeter preferred to record with sextets of varying instrumentation rather than the standard quintet setting of trumpet, tenor sax, piano, bass and drums. And in several cases, such as Tom Cat, Search For The New Land, Cornbread and The Procrastinator, it brought out the best in his compositional talents.

The assembled cast for this album is not only spectacular, but they are all people with whom Lee had played and with whom he shared history and empathy.

Curtis Fuller, of course, had worked with and was at the time working along side Lee in the Jazz Messengers. But during the mid and late fifties, their collaborations were spread throughout the Blue Note vaults and included Clifford Jordan's first album, John Coltrane's Blue Train, Jimmy Smith's The Sermon, House Party and Confirmation, Lee's City Lights and Fuller's Sliding Easy.

Jackie McLean, prior to this date, had appeared on Lee's 1960 album Leeway, and they worked together on Grachan Moncur's Evolution. But from this date on, they would record together with increasing frequency. Under McLean's leader ship came Consequence and Jacknife, both of which remained unissued until the late seventies. And under Lee's name came Cornbread, Charisma, The Sixth Sense and the soon to be released Infinity. As Larry Kart wrote in his notes for Consequence, "Also worth mentioning is the way Lee and Jackie play the heads together. Such ensemble niceties weren't granted too much attention at the time because the music was felt to be essentially soloistic, but I can think of few things in jazz more fascinating than the way McLean and Morgan perfectly blend their sounds (each so totally individual) to create a third sound that has the emotional richness of both and something more besides."

Bassist Bob Cranshaw, who would later become a Blue Note regular and appear on many dates with Morgan, was present on Moncur's Evolution and The Sidewinder. At that time, Lee told Leonard Feather, "Bob's one of the best all-around bass players on the scene today. He's got a great sound, and no matter what kind of music you bring in, he can see what's happening and read it. And he can walk, and he can solo."

McCoy Tyner, a fellow Philadelphian and only six months younger than Lee, did not enter the professional jazz ranks until late 1959 when he became a member of the Benny Golson-Art Farmer Jazztet, which also included Curtis Fuller. In fact, it was on one of Fuller's Savoy dates that McCoy made his recording debut. His first recorded encounter with Lee took place four months prior to this date on Wayne Shorter's Night Dreamer.

As for Art Blakey, it is hard to think of one musician without thinking of the other. To this day, Lee Morgan is still the one that remains closest to Blakey's heart. The drummer said recently, "I always loved him. And over the years, conversations would get back to me where Lee had stuck up for me. You couldn't say anything bad about me around Lee. During that year (1964), he was really getting himself back together. It was beautiful to watch. On our Japanese tour, he only spent one week's salary. All that money coming in from The Sidewinder...we held that for him." Undoubtedly, the love between these two men, especially at this time, translated itself to the music.

With the exception of Tyner's lovely, triple meter ballad Twilight Mist, which showcases McCoy and Lee, all of the compositions are by Lee. And each is strikingly unique in flavor and musical construction. Throughout, these six men play off each other beautifully.

Around 1960, Lee Morgan told Nat Hentoff, "I don't think I have a completely original style, though I 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 a definite style comes with living and experience and travelling until you play what you are...you play yourself through the horn."

In both his writing and his playing, Morgan's identity did become a definite style, His cockiness and, most of all, his spontaneity and soulfulness came resounding through everything that he produced. In the February 19, 1970 issue of Downbeat magazine, he was quoted as saying, "The first rock and roll group I was in — me and Archie Shepp and Reggie Workman for a while too — was Carl Holmes and the Jolly Rompers...Music is coming so close together...I've been through all that, besides jazz and rock and roll...I don't like labels. If you can play, you can play with everybody. Look at Coleman Hawkins, Joe Henderson. Whatever you prefer, you'll find sufficient quantities of talented musicians who prefer the same. But you should never limit your mind. With the new thing coming in, I'm one of those who prefer to swing a lot. But I've experimented with free forms, like on Grachan Moncur's Evolution and Andrew Hill's Grass Roots — playing without the rhythm, against the rhythm, disregarding it — the whole freedom thing. The avant garde organist who plays with Tony Williams, Larry Young: I made an album with him (Mother Ship). And the next week one with Lonnie Smith (Think), a whole different thing... There are no natural barriers. It's all music. It's either hip or it ain't."

—Michael Cuscuna

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT TOM CAT

Like many of Blue Note's artists in the 1950s and '60s, Lee Morgan produced the majority of his albums at the helm of bands that had no existence beyond the confines of Rudy Van Gelder's studio. They rarely contained total strangers, as the active recording scene of the period and the criss-crossing bandstand affiliations these musicians enjoyed in clubs guaranteed more than a modicum of familiarity. Still, the specific musicians recruited for this and many other albums had not developed a history as a unit, which does count for something in music where the input of each band member can alter the spontaneous balance. Tom Cat is an example of an album on which success flowed from the way the players related specifically to two of the participants. Michael Cuscuna's original liner notes stress the empathy each sideman had developed over time with the date's leader, Lee Morgan, but their varying relationship to drummer Art Blakey is equally pivotal.

The three horn players are all Jazz Messenger alumni, with tenures covering an almost unbroken stretch of Messengers history from late-1956, when McLean came on board, through the early part of 1965, when Morgan made his final exit from the band. As important as the comfort that Morgan, McLean, and Curtis Fuller feel with each other is to the success of the music, their common ability to luxuriate in Blakey's deep rhythmic pocket, and his complementary knowledge of which buttons to push as each man steps forward to solo, all help lift the music to the realm of the exceptional.

Blakey's history with his rhythm section mates was hardly as extensive, as neither Bob Cranshaw nor McCoy Tyner had put in any time as Messengers to this point. (Tyner would serve briefly in the years after he left John Coltrane's quartet, though no documentation of his tenure has appeared to-date.) Tom Cat is actually only the second of two Blakey/Tyner encounters on record. The drummer and pianist first met a year before the present session on Blakey's quartet album, A Jazz Message (Impulse!). They did not mesh with any kind of consistency on that effort, the result perhaps of music that never really settled between the poles of the straight-up bebop that the session's horn soloist Sonny Stitt preferred and the more expansive and contemporary flow of the music Tyner and session bassist Art Davis had made when the pair worked together in John Coltrane's group. When the present music was made, there was no such need to search for a comfort zone. Blakey and Morgan were already locked into the same swinging wavelength, while Tyner was more than familiar with Morgan's approach from their teenage years as prodigies in Philadelphia. Everyone seems to have fit together immediately and effectively, with Cranshaw's big, steady beat no doubt also deserving some of the credit for the impeccable comfort level throughout.

Sextet projects were the occasions for much of Morgan's best writing, as Cuscuna notes, and his three contributions here only confirm the point while employing ideas that were among Morgan's favorites. The use of two distinct feelings on the title track's solo choruses, for one instance, was reprised in more incendiary fashion a year later when Morgan cut "Our Man Higgins" on his Cornbread album, and the way "Twice Around" employs different tempos to create distinct moods on the same melodic material anticipates "The Procrastinator" by three years. A similar effect is obtained when the meditative opening of "Exotique" shifts to a hypnotic 6/8 tempo, recalling "Search for the New Land" from earlier in 1964. Morgan is not simply recycling effects, but rather applying then in conjunction with fresh melodic and harmonic material that both inspires the soloists and sustains the listeners' interest.

Recording more sessions than could practically be released at the time was part of Alfred Lion's overall approach at Blue Note. Still, it is rather shocking that a collection as strong as Tom Cat took 16 years to surface, especially when it contained something as obviously funky and listener-friendly as the title track. The lack of a cut with both soul and the danceable groove of "The Sidewinder" is the only imaginable explanation for why such winning music was shelved. Its belated appearance provided one more bit of evidence that the resurgent Lee Morgan of the mid-sixties was about much more than simply making hits.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2005

Notes for the 2012 CD Edition

"Tom Cat" and "The Procrastinator" remain my favorites among the many Lee Morgan sessions that I was able to release years later. This is just an absolutely terrific band. The unusual instrumentation of the front line (trumpet, trombone, alto sax) give these wonderful compositions an extra punch. This was Art Blakey's final recording session as a sideman (undoubtedly a favor for Lee who was making his comeback in Blakey's band at the time). It's a shame that Blakey and McCoy Tyner didn't get to record together very often. They fit together beautifully.  

The reason "Tom Cat" was shelved and "Search For The New Land" (4169), also recorded in 1964, was delayed a few years was because "The Sidewinder" (4157) had become such a surprise hit. Blue Note brought Lee back into the studio to record "The Rumproller" (4199) which was a follow-up to "The  Sidewinder" in the same style.  
- Michael Cuscuna