The most extravagantly talented trumpeter of his generation – even though his talents were often dispersed or misplaced or simply, as in the later part of his brief career, taken for granted. He grew up in Philadelphia and was in love with jazz from an early age: Reggie Workman remembered how 'he knew about everybody from Pops right on up to today, yet he amalgamated it into his own sound'. By the time he was 18 he was good enough to secure a gig with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers (and make his first LPs), but this lasted only a few weeks, and he then joined Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra until it disbanded in 1958. Blakey took him on again and he stayed until 1961. In this period, Morgan was all flash and fire and high spirits, and perhaps not much more than the sum of his influences (primarily Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown), but with Blakey his sound became thicker and some of the shrillness hardened and settled down. Aside from another period with Blakey in 1964–5, he thereafter freelanced, mostly as a member of his own groups. Alfred Lion recorded him almost obsessively for Blue Note: he cut more than 20 sessions for the label as a leader and appeared as a sideman on dozens of others. His playing took on a technically more challenging cast, using half-valved trumpet sounds and shying away from bebop pyrotechnics and into a more thoughtful though still demanding procedure. It was something of an irony that his track and album The Sidewinder (1964), a catchy groove tune, became Blue Note's biggest hit and the piece of music which pushed the label towards its first real sales success: its simple boogaloo setting wasn't really where Morgan was heading. Nevertheless, thereafter Lion constantly tried to get him to repeat the trick on his albums.

Much of his work from the later 60s has been undervalued, although it's true that in place of the old exuberance there is a sometimes troubling and clouded feel to his playing, as if there was something heavy on his mind; and many of his best solos are hidden on obscure Blue Note dates, far away from The Sidewinder. The hit sustained him through a period when his kind of jazz went into a steep commercial decline: he refused to go towards fusion or the kind of sellout which Donald Byrd embraced, and he even took part in the Jazz And People's Movement, protesting at the disrespect jazz received from the American cultural establishment. He was playing at a club called Slug's, in New York, on a cold night in 1972, when a long-standing female friend found him with another woman in the club, and shot him dead with his own pistol.

Biography from Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia (2005).

If you'd like more information, check out The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) or The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (2007), both of which are still in print.