Full Description
This is the first biography of the jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan (1938-72). He was a prodigy: recruited to Dizzy Gillespie's big band while still a teenager, joining Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers not much after, by his early-20s Morgan had played on four continents and dozens of albums. The trumpeter would go on to cultivate a personal and highly influential style, and to make records - most notably, The Sidewinder - which would sell amounts almost unheard of in jazz. While what should have been Morgan's most successful years were hampered by a heroin addiction, the ascendant black liberation movement of the late-60s gave the musician a new, political impulse, and he returned to the jazz scene to become a vociferous campaigner for black musicians' rights and representation. But Morgan's personal life remained troubled, and during a fight with his girlfriend at a New York club, he was shot and killed, aged 33. Although Lee Morgan lived and died in sensational style, the story told in this book doesn't just stumble between stages, studios, bars and needles; such a narrative couldn't do justice to the richness of the trumpeter's music, nor to the culture from which it came.
Here, then, the events of Morgan's life are presented not just as items of biography, but also as points of departure for wider historical investigations that aim to situate the musician and his contemporaries in changing aesthetic, social and economic contexts. The work draws on many original interviews with Morgan's colleagues and friends, as well as extensive archival research and critical engagement with the music itself.
Contents
1. Introduction: Black Philadelphia 2. Music and opportunity in Tioga 3. Learning and teaching, formal and informal 4. Performance, competition and status in the 'cool world' 5. The break 6. Quick progress 7. Under Art Blakey's influence 8. Life in the bebop business and the soul jazz style 9. Blues truth, sound and identity 10, Interlude: jazz criticism and race politics in the early-1960s 11. Symbolism, signification and The Sidewinder 12. Decline and ascent 13. Modes, changes and 'The Beatles' 14. Drug 15. Organisation and protest 16. Black culture between the national and the universal 17. Teaching tradition and change 18. Conclusion: East 3rd Street
