Lee Morgan - Unforgettable Lee! (Fresh Sound)

The 1960 edition of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers -- featuring Wayne Shorter, lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons and Jymie Merritt -- was an explosive unit, and one whose star soloists were also masters of their own brand of "sick" humor -- as such yuks were known in the late 1950's from which these men were departing. Yet the 1960 Messengers were much more than a collection a well-drilled rogue elements. I always thought it appropriate that one of Shorter's compositions for this group was entitled "Giantis" (see Like Someone In Love on Blue Note). It is a name that conjures up for me images of Stan Lee's original X-Men, inked so as to look like slimmed-down bumblebees and battling some green- and purple-visaged, adamantine-shelled, blunt-clawed (in the best Jack Kirby tradition) creature breaking free of its cosmic bonds and bursting through the concrete of a pseudo-Manhattan thoroughfare: fire hydrants take off on rockets of municipal supply spray, faceless citizens scream or cower, and brownstones cant like windowed dominos in a Cold War chain of wavering nation-states.

Come to think of it, Stan Lee's genius was not unlike Blakey's. Both men created genres in which their leading characters were at war with themselves as much as they were opposed to a world that refused to understand them or recognize their humanity. Giantis: one's own grandiosity? Giantis is, ultimately, easily dispatched, but one's insecurities, envies, and hormones coalesce into an energy that is both one's best friend and one's most vile nemesis. Both the Silver Age Marvel comics and hard bop are narrative styles that mutated into genres. Both are meta-narratives, and both lend the simple and occasional downright petty emotions of prolonged adolescence a gravitas. A gravitas, moreover, that has proved nearly inexhaustible and addictive for more than three successive generations of audiences.

(FWIW, I don't buy the connection between Greek tragedy and the Marvel superhero yarn, and I won't be convinced until someone sorts out all the theological and psychological dilemmas inherent in these forms.)

Although Wayne Shorter is the first soloist on many of these Birdland broadcasts, and although his work here only further underscores how his first mature style, a synthesis of Rollins'-like ribald humor and Coltrane-derived "sheets of sound" (cf., "It's Only A Paper Moon"), was among the most unique and important of its time, it is Lee Morgan whose name appears above the title here, and for good reason. A good chunk of attention has been focused, and rightfully so, on the work of trumpeters such as Don Cherry and Booker Little as being on the most leading edge of jazz trumpet playing in the early 1960's. But Lee Morgan's odyssey is both one of the most personal and most informative in all of jazz's history. It may be that Morgan recorded too prolifically for his own posterity -- a pretty counter-intuitive notion, that -- but most analyses of Morgan's work do him a disservice, sputtering out into claims that he made a number of largely indistinguishable, boogaloo-bloated albums after returning from his a sabbatical in his native Philadelphia in 1963.

It helps to remember, however, that Morgan is all of 22 years old here. This is the sound of a very seasoned prodigy. Each solo by the trumpeter finds him stripping away the lingering influence of Navarro and Brown. The core that is left is a voice that is nearly strangulated by its own fervor, and one whose penchant for braggadocio is balanced by a propensity for cold-blooded introspection. My own taste takes over when I say this, but I do feel that one of the most convincing indications of Morgan's mastery is that he so obviously began to listen to and emulate the highly vocalized approach of Kenny Dorham at this stage of his career. In any event, Morgan's wild maturation can be witnessed at every index point on this 2-disc set. It is all there in a pealing, yearning "Along Came Betty"; an argumentative "So Tired"; a "Dat Dere" that starts off subdued, then shifts immediately from soft, bent cries to a crescendo of long, high, vibrato-less tones, and ends with a blat that sounds, in this context, like self-deprecation; and three versions of "This Here" that each serve as wonderful examples of his sardonic eloquence. (Did anyone ever use the trill as brilliantly as Morgan? And just listen to how he responds to Blakey.)

Ah, to be young, incredibly talented, and a complete misfit with an ill-defined, inexpressible grudge to grind... To be the James Dean of hard bop stars: dreamy but gawky; capable of both crocodile tears and true lamentation; so fashionable and frail as to gamble with effeminacy; and driven by appetite for fast living, that for all the vicarious pleasure it gives us, is only going to be the death of him.