LT-987

Lee Morgan - Sonic Boom

Released - 1979

Recording and Session Information

Lee Morgan, trumpet; David Newman, tenor sax; Cedar Walton, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

1878 tk.7 Sonic Boom

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, April 28, 1967
Lee Morgan, trumpet; David Newman, tenor sax #1-4; Cedar Walton, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Billy Higgins, drums.

1879 tk.8 Sneaky Pete
1880 tk.9 The Mercenary
1881 tk.14 Mumbo Jumbo
1882 tk.20 Fathead
1883 tk.22 I'll Never Be The Same

Session Photos

Photos: © Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images 
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Sneaky Pete	Lee Morgan	28 April 1967
The Mercenary	Lee Morgan	28 April 1967
Sonic Boom	Lee Morgan	14 April 1967
Side Two
Fathead	Lee Morgan	28 April 1967
I'll Never Be The Same	Kahn-Malneck-Signorelli	28 April 1967
Mumbo Jumbo	Lee Morgan	28 April 1967

Liner Notes

LEE MORGAN

In the mid fifties, the trumpet was completely dominated by Dizzy Gillespie and the ghosts of Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro. Several young players, notably Art Farmer, Donald Byrd and Lee Morgan, emerged on the scene with the clear indication that each would soon find his own voice. And each did.

Lee Morgan, born in Philadelphia in 1938, was a shining light on the Philly scene even as a teenager. In 1956, at the age of 18, he recorded his first album as leader for Blue Note. He also joined Dizzy Gillespie's legendary big band around the same time. With superior technique and a thorough knowledge of his predecessors, Lee Morgan began to draw attention and to work on developing his own singular voice.

In early 1958, the Gillespie band broke and Lee's contract with Blue Note expired. He soon signed with Vee Jay Records and in September made the most important step of his career by joining Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. The band consisted of Blakey, Morgan, Bobby Timmons on piano, Jymie Merritt on bass and on tenor sax Hank Mobley soon to be replaced by Benny Golson, soon to be replaced by Wayne Shorter. An argument could be made for the thesis that this was the golden era of the Jazz Messengers, both in personnel and in material. Their three year history is well documented over a number of Blue Note albums.

After two years off the scene, Lee Morgan re-emerged in 1963 stronger than ever. He signed again with Blue Note; his first album under the new pact turned out to be the biggest selling record in Blue Note's history to that point. It was The Sidewinder.

In 1964, Lee joined Blakey for another year, but thereafter he remained a leader and prolific Blue Note regular until his death in 1972. During that time, a treasure trove of unissued sessions collected in the Blue Note library Cedar Walton, Ron Carter and Billy Higgins are familiar regulars on sessions by Lee Morgan and many other Blue Note artists. The biggest surprise in personnel on this date is the great Texas tenor saxophonist David Fathead Newman.

In the very early fifties, David, who grew up in Dallas with the likes of King Curtis and Ornette Coleman, made the chitlins circuit with Lowell Fulsom and T-Bone Walker, playing alto, tenor and baritone saxophones. In 1955, he joined Ray Charles' band playing exclusively baritone since Don Wilkerson was the tenor soloist in the band. When Wilkerson left, Fathead (as he was nicknamed by a high school music teacher for fluffing a chart) took over the tenor chair and the spotlight that came with it. By 1958, he was recording as a leader for Atlantic under the auspices of Charles. On his own recordings, he used both tenor and alto.

David has been a leader most of the time since the mid sixties. Like Lee Morgan, he has been criticized for his natural sense of the blues and funk, but he has always been an intelligent, bop-rooted player. This Lee Morgan session inspired him to exercise his ability in the bop idiom. A year after this session, Lee and David would make up the front line for one of organist Lonnie Smith's Blue Note records.

The Sidewinder and such follow ups as The Rumproller, (composed by Andrew Hill) and Cornbread insured Lee's popularity, but drew unnecessary criticism from critics. The themes to the aforementioned tunes are irresistibly funky, but the solos and the remaining compositions on each album were on a very serious and creative level. The more close-minded journalists never got past the heads on the title tunes, and Lee Morgan was pigeon-holed unfairly in the hacneyed funk idiom, Thankfully, the music has survived the reviews.

Blue Note always liked to have that lead off funk tune to sell the album. The extraordinary, unexpected success of The Sidewinder and Horace Silver's Song For My Father put even more pressure on the company and its artists to match that success. On this particular session, Fathead, Morgan's tribute to Newman, was obviously the intended ringer. But there is nothing light about the content of the performance with Cedar Walton's gospel tinged comping stealing the show.

Walton, of course, was a member of Blakey's band when Lee rejoined in 1964. They crossed paths frequently at Blue Note sessions. Cedar is the pianist on three other Lee Morgan albums from this same period: Charisma, The Sixth Sense and Caramba, all of which also have Billy Higgins on drums.

Higgins propelled the majority of Blue Note's output in the sixties and is present on almost all of Lee's dates as a leader. His drumming is strong, consistent, clean and very musical. He was as indispensible as he seemed.

Ron Carter, in his last year with Miles Davis at the time of this recording, was also on Morgan's The Procrastinor, recorded three months after Sonic Boom. At the time, Ron's style had the best of several worlds; he was a solid backbone bassist when he was walking; he did however incorporate a pliable, playful sense of time, and his choice of notes was inventive fuel for the soloists.

If a funky tune like Fathead was a consistent trademark of Lee Morgan albums in the sixties, so was a soulful, creative rendering of a well chosen standard. In this case, it is I'll Never Be The Same. Newman lays out for this one, and Lee and Cedar turn in gorgeous solos.

Morgan frequently enjoyed playing on a Latin-Calypso type of rhythm around which he wrote a number of tunes. This album's closer Mumbo Jumbo is characteristic of his approach.

But as a composer, his underrated talent shines on an absolutely fantastic melody line for Sneaky Pete. Carter gets a chance to solo here, as he does on The Mercenary, another intriguing Morgan tune. The A section of The Mercenary has the rhythm section running through the changes in a riff pattern that is set off against the horns' melody, a compositional device that dates back to Jelly Roll Morton. The B section or bridge is in Calypso rhythm for the theme and straight swing for the solos.

Sonic Boom, which finds Higgins trading eights with Lee, was recorded on April, 14, 1967, while all the other tunes were recorded on April 28, exactly two weeks later. For some reason, this seems to have been a pattern with a number of Lee Morgan dates. The band comes in, gets one tune and suddenly the session dissipates. The same personnel comes back a week or two later and runs through all of the tunes effortlessly.

Any newly discovered Lee Morgan material is of great value to jazz. But hearing David Newman is such a fresh, uncompromising setting makes this album all the more special. Newman and Walton, like Morgan, have the ability to play from both the mind and the gut. The combination here is a logical and compatible one.

The release of this record is tragically posthumous as well as twelve years late. But it is here nonetheless.

—Michael Cuscuna