Billboard : 03/02/1957
Spotlight on… selection

Blue Note has come up with another first that deserved much more circulation than it’s likely to get. This time it’s an 18-year-old modern trumpeter who immediately can take his place with the top men on the horn. Technically, emotionally and creatively, Morgan knows what he’s about. The same may be said for his young altoist sidekick, Clarence Sharpe, also debuting here. They get real pro help from Horace Silver, Wilbur Ware and Philly Joe Jones. Morgan is being featured with the Dizzy Gillespie band currently, and he should be heard from plenty in the future.

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Down Beat : 04/04/1957
Nat Hentoff : 3.5 stars

Lee Morgan, the 18-year old Philadelphia trumpeter now with Dizzy Gillespie, makes his first LP as a leader an encouraging one. He plays not only with the fire of his youth but with intelligent, developing conception, a good beat, and the strong indication that he can become in time an important voice. He can wail hard in the Gillespie-Navarro–Brown line on up-tempos and also sustain a more introspective mood in the same idiom, as on Lady. He plays with assurance and open emotions. Although many-noted, he blows with less of the rhetorical flash that one normally might expect from a comer his age, and his attack is biting and vigorous.

Sharpe, the altoist, another Philadelphian, has been buried in rhythm and blues bands. He blows with somewhat less authority at times than Morgan but as he gains more regular jazz blowing time, should project more incisively and with greater individuality. He is evolving interestingly but is somewhat too acrid-toned.

It might have been wiser to pair Morgan with a more experienced reedman, and conversely, for Sharpe to have made his record debut with an older-in-playing-time trumpeter. The rhythm section is excellent. Horace solos with laconic funk and comps intensely. Benny Golson and Owen Marshall each are responsible for two originals. One apiece comes from Silver and Donald Byrd. All are inviting frameworks.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

In light of statistics currently available, it would appear that jazz has reached a plateau of achievement that is little short of breathtaking. Not only are there more gifted musicians per square mile than any one student can possibly keep track of; there are also more jazz record releases per hip minute; moreover, the time taken by these musicians and these records in reaching the public is diminishing constantly. No more striking example could be found than in the first recording by Lee Morgan, a trumpet player newly on the scene from Philadelphia.

Lee Morgan is eighteen. Yet he is no mere prodigy, no freak sensation limited by youth and inexperience. At this writing, he is holding down what may well be one of the most challenging assignments in contemporary jazz, working with John Gillespie‘s big band as featured trumpet soloist – yes, featured, and featured proudly, because as a trumpet player himself, Gillespie is particularly well qualified to pass on the merits of this astonishing youngest. Though Lee Morgan’s style stems directly from the bop dynasty started some thirteen years ago by Gillespie, he was just five years old when the first important bop records reached the public. Today, though his sound is that of a mature and inspired musician, his age is less than half that of his bop-pioneer boss (time, of course, will adjust this disproportion – by 1960, he will be more than half as old as Dizzy.)

But enough of this quibbling about age brackets; we should be more concerned about what Lee Morgan has to say and less absorbed in the fact of his saying it so unexpectedly soon. A brief biographical rundown reveals that he was born Edward Lee Morgan, July 10, 1938 in Philadelphia, the youngest of four children, that his father works in a wool factory and his sister plays piano for a church choir. He studied trumpet privately, and at Mastbaum Tech; at school he doubled on alto horn. Form the age of fifteen, he has played week ends with his own combo around town, making the college fraternity and dance route mostly in partnership with a bass player who delights in the name of Spanky DeBrest.

Playing in a series of Tuesday night jazz workshop conclaves at Music City, he met and/or sat in with many of the big names such as Miles Davis and Clifford Brown. Last summer, when Art Blakey arrived in town with a revamped edition of the Jazz Messengers, his new trumpet player was sick and the bassist was hung up somewhere.

“Spanky and I helped them out,” says Lee. “Spanky stayed on. I could have stayed on, too, but I didn’t want to sign a contract, so I left after two weeks. Then very soon after that, Dizzy came back from his South American tour. I’d met him a couple of years before at the workshop and he knew about me. He needed a replacement for Joe Gordon, and I needed some big band experience, so it worked out fine.”

As one might expect of any trumpet player born in Philadelphia in 1938, Lee Morgan names as his idols and influences, John Gillespie, Fats Navarro and Clifford Brown, and is impressed by the work of Kenny Dorham, Thad Jones and Art Farmer. Though you will hear all of these influences at work in his performances on these sides, you will also draw the inference that anyone who can cook with this much assurance at this stage of his development is reasonably certain to have an unmistakable style of his own, not to mention a flock of imitators, before too many years roll by.

For his record debut, Lee brought with him a friend from Philadelphia. (“Clarence Sharpe seemed to us to be the playingest young altoman around Philly, but nobody seemed to give him enough recognition – he’d been working in rhythm and blues bands.”) The rhythm section should now be familiar to Blue Note aficionados. Horace Silver, of course, has had his own quintet since leaving the Jazz Messengers; Philly Joe Jones, whose steady gig is with Miles Davis, has been heard on several LPs on this label, and Wilbur Ware was featured on J.R. Monterose‘s Blue Note LP 1536.

Roccus, which opens the first side, is a minor key Latin opus which Horace originally wrote and recorded with the Lou Donaldson quartet. The startling impact of hearing Lee’s first solo is better heard than described, so we won’t go into details. Clarence Sharpe (whom we prefer to think of as a C#) has an interesting sound, perhaps a little more reminiscent of that of Lem Davis, a well-known alto man of the ’40s, than of Charlie Parker, though Bird certainly seems to be the main undercurrent stylistically.

Reggie of Chester, written by Benny Golson, the talented composer and tenor man with the Gillespie band, offers a superb sample of Lee’s command, confidence and continuity. The Lady, written by Owen E. Marshall, a trumpeter and pianist from Philadelphia, offers the first illustration of the Morgan approach to a slow, pretty tune, equipped with all the qualities that contribute toward an intelligent modern jazz trumpet solo: the economy of notes where economy is called for, sensitive use of grace notes and appogiaturas, an occasional surprising cluster of dotted eights and sixteenths or of triplets, and many other devices. Horace and C# are heard from before Lee returns for the effective closing cadenzas.

Little T, an original by another promising young trumpet player, Donald Byrd, runs over eight minutes and offers extensive solo play to trumpet, alto and piano before Lee returns in around the six-minute mark. Gaza Strip, another Owen Marshall opus, proceeds from an eight-bar introduction by Philly Joe into a simple, up-tempo minor theme from which C# takes off for one of his best solos, followed again by the contributions of Horace and Lee. Stand By, another Golson original, has an infectious upward line in its theme and follows the same general pattern, except that a walking bass solo by Wilbur Ware follows the trumpet.

I’d like to suggest that you try a blindfold test with your friends with this record. You may be surprised at some of the guesses you’ll get on the alto player, but more particularly, of course, on the trumpet soloist. It goes without saying that he’ll be mistaken for men who can spot him many years’ experience, but who have nothing on him in command of the horn and in sheer exultant exuberance of improvisation. Credit Blue Note with yet another in the long line of impressive “firsts” that it has succeeded in registering through almost two decades of jazz recording.