Lee Morgan Search for the New Land Review

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February 12, 2010
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Lee Morgan
Search for the New Land
Blue Note / Music Matters
2009 (1964)

Backed by what may take been his most emphatically modern group, trumpeter Lee Morgan did indeed set out on an exploratory quest in this follow-up to his smash, hard bop gem, The Sidewinder (Blue Note, 1964). The championship track, which kicks off the album, is more in-line with the music saxophonist John Coltrane was making at the time—a spiritual, meditative piece partitioned into classical-similar movements, rather than one of the hard bop soloing vehicles for which Morgan was known. And while those up-tempo grooves are present as well on Search—namely in the invigorating second track, "The Joker," and the somewhat less successful closer, "Morgan the Pirate"—the experience of the album every bit a whole is 1 of drift and discovery, celebrating from a perspective of self-realization (or the attempt at such) rather than as part of some nightclub revelry.

"Search for the New Land" opens with an outer-dimensional trill from Grant Dark-green 's guitar and drummer Baton Higgins ' cymbals, a duet that resurfaces throughout the piece. The tragic, anthemic, yet exhilarating, horn theme blown by Morgan and saxophonist Wayne Shorter adds purpose to Green's and Higgins' echoing waves, setting the intelligence, longing and desire of humanity's drive atop the waves to attain toward unknown, distant possibilities. The music pauses to be reawakened afterward a space past Reggie Workman 's bass. This artifice will be repeated four more times throughout the piece, sectioning information technology off for the soloists—Shorter, Morgan, Light-green and pianist Herbie Hancock , in that order—again, giving the music the quality and gravitas of movements every bit opposed to a continual line of solo jazz choruses.

The disparity in the approaches of Shorter and Morgan is immediately apparent, with Shorter at the forefront of a style that shrugged off the linear path in favor of one that allows for lateral exploration—of communicating and fleshing out a experience, an idea, without concern for telling a recognizable tale. In this, Shorter can be said to be very much of his time and, indeed, a leader and shaper of the sounds that were to emerge as distinctly of the 1960s. Morgan, conversely, is bright and well-baked, blowing from the forceful, difficult bop school, his aggressive, out-front end nature continually on display. He, the leader, and king of his realm, is the one searching hither, with Shorter and Hancock as guides leading him into the new, open country where he might farther his art. This contrast in styles keeps the record intriguing from beginning to terminate—the clash, the twining, fashioning a new land perhaps not even sought, but, as with many inventions, stumbled upon while seeking something else.

Greenish'south playing is likewise a revelation, not and then much in its creativity or difference from his playing elsewhere, simply precisely because the tones are instantly recognizable as Green's and all the same gleam with an added brightness while in league with these particular musicians and this brand of music. His trademark repeated blues figures cutting somewhere between the definitive brass shots of Morgan and the slithering gasps of Shorter. Hancock is the adapter, constantly shifting, constantly inventive in back up of the disparate solo voices. When he himself solos, he sounds echoes of the other 3, reworking them into a single voice that can exist bopped about at his folly and incorporated every bit an extended dimension of his own distinctive lyricism.

While all the compositions on the album are Morgan'south, "Mr. Kenyatta," which kicks off side three of Music Matters' 45-rpm, ii-record reissue, might exist said to exist the trumpeter'due south manner forwards as a musical leader, its drive and structure less dependent on the light, pensive modernism than stretched from Morgan's ain home turf of aggressive throttling into a still powerful, but more polished, calibrated and slippery argument. "Melancholee," its requisite, forced pun on Morgan's proper name aside (how and why did puns on leaders' names go so viral in jazz?), is another stab at the new, searching music. Less one thousand than the title track, it is, nevertheless, a soulful, affecting ballad, the likes of which one might not expect to observe on a Morgan record, permit alone find more than than once.

"Morgan the Pirate" is most notable for its game—intentional or non—of role reversal, with Morgan stretching many of the notes on his solo, assuasive his argument to slide and droop rather than be crisply articulated throughout. Shorter, instead, fires off quickly strung lines of well-delineated notes, casting aside his more typical ruminative grapheme. Light-green, as ever, is himself, though his triplets mid-solo are irresistibly cast, snapping loose electrically frayed forms hardly contained by the speakers.

It'southward a shame Morgan didn't follow the path of this music farther. The subsequent commercial success of The Sidewinder may have fabricated such exploration less desirable in the short run. And his murder at the hands of his mutual-law wife, Helen More than, in Feb 1972, made the short run and the long run one and the aforementioned, even as he once over again seemed to be pushing outward (as evidenced past the 1971 Blue Note album that came to be chosen The Last Session). Notwithstanding, we have in Search a shining example of the great trumpeter stretching into modernist fields. It is possibly plumbing fixtures, given the exploratory tone of the record, and its championship track, in detail, that we must imagine what might have come next.

Tracks: Disc 1: Search for the New Land; The Joker. Disc Two: Mr. Kenyatta; Melancholee; Morgan the Pirate.

Personnel: Lee Morgan: trumpet; Wayne Shorter: tenor saxophone; Grant Light-green: guitar; Herbie Hancock: piano; Reginald Workman: bass; Billy Higgins: drums.

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Source: https://www.allaboutjazz.com/lee-morgan-search-for-the-new-land-by-matt-marshall