Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder (Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series LP)

Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder | Vinyl LP - Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series Reissue (BST 84157, mastered by Kevin Gray, 180g)

Lee Morgan joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers at 18 and had already recorded half a dozen Blue Note sessions as a leader by the time he cut The Sidewinder on December 21, 1963. He was 25 years old. Alfred Lion produced, Rudy Van Gelder engineered, and the five-piece group Morgan brought to the session played through all five tracks in a single date. Joe Henderson, who'd joined Blue Note's roster earlier that year, plays tenor saxophone. Barry Harris plays piano with the Detroit bebop grounding he'd learned from studying Bud Powell's recordings. Bob Cranshaw plays bass. Billy Higgins, Ornette Coleman's original drummer, plays with a lighter touch than most hard bop sessions of the period.

The title track opens the album. Morgan wrote a riff based on a boogaloo rhythm, straight eighth notes borrowed from R&B rather than the swinging ride pattern of conventional hard bop, and the effect was immediate. The track crossed over to the Billboard pop charts, sold in quantities Blue Note hadn't seen before, and pulled the label back from financial trouble. It also launched a boogaloo trend across the Blue Note catalogue. Horace Silver, Grant Green and others followed with their own straight-eighth grooves over the following years. The other four tracks are less poppy but no less well played. "Totem Pole" stretches to ten minutes with Henderson and Morgan trading solos at length, "Gary's Notebook" swings in the more traditional sense, and "Boy, What A Night" and "Hocus-Pocus" fill out the second side. All five compositions are Morgan's.

This is the Blue Note Classic Vinyl Series reissue (BST 84157 / 0743886), the first release in the series, mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and pressed at Optimal Media on 180g vinyl.