In 1964, life appeared good for Lee Morgan. The younger hornblower’s state of affairs hadn’t been fairly as rosy two years earlier. That was when his heroin dependancy spiraled uncontrolled, leading to his worrying disappearance from the US jazz scene. However in late 1963, the trumpeter turned his life round by enrolling in a detox program. He bought clear and put his profession again on monitor. “During that year, he was really getting himself back together,” drummer Artwork Blakey later recalled. “It was beautiful to watch.”
Seemingly rejuvenated and bursting with new music, Morgan rejoined Artwork Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the arduous bop supergroup that he had first joined as a 20-year-old in 1958, showing on the band’s Blue Notice album Indestructible, whose title appeared becoming for a musician who had triumphantly returned from the brink of self-destruction. Considerably, Morgan’s comeback noticed him signal a brand new contract with Blue Notice Information, the label that first signed him as a young person in 1956. The deal resulted in three of the best albums of his profession: The Sidewinder, Search For The New Land, and Tom Cat.
Launched in July 1964, The Sidewinder, whose catchy and eminently danceable title monitor lit up the US pop charts, made Morgan a family title. However its phenomenal success caught each the trumpeter and Blue Notice unexpectedly, delaying the discharge of the album’s supposed follow-up, the extra meditative Search For The New Land. Simply earlier than The Sidewinder ceaselessly modified Morgan’s life, the trumpeter went to Van Gelder Studio, New Jersey, in August 1964 with producer Alfred Lion to document what grew to become Tom Cat.
Tom Cat was markedly totally different in character from The Sidewinder and Search For The New Land. Although just like the latter album, it featured a sextet – a band configuration Morgan favored that introduced out the most effective in him as a composer – Tom Cat featured harder, extra muscular grooves. The rationale for that was the presence of the formidable Artwork Blakey on drums, who introduced his highly effective polyrhythmic propulsion to a session that additionally included a number of different former after which present Jazz Messengers like alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and trombonist Curtis Fuller. To finish the sextet, Morgan introduced in fast-rising Chicago bassist Bob Cranshaw and childhood buddy, pianist McCoy Tyner, then a member of the John Coltrane Quartet.
The album’s first monitor, “Tom Cat,” had an intro outlined by a prowling, pussyfooted gait earlier than altering gear and changing into a driving arduous bop piece powered by Blakey’s swinging groove. On this monitor and the others that adopted – together with the hard-swinging “Riggarmortes,” the swashbuckling “Twice Around,” and Center Jap-tinged “Exotique” with its mournful bluesy intro – the band’s three-horn frontline imbued the album with a uniquely wealthy sonority. Morgan performed with swagger and his customary elan on the uptempo numbers whereas revealing his lyrical facet on the set’s solely ballad, the fragile Tyner-written “Twilight Mist.”
After The Sidewinder took off so spectacularly, Blue Notice shelved each The Search For The New Land and Tom Cat, persuading Morgan to document as a substitute one other commercial-oriented album, The Rumproller. Though Search For The New Land finally surfaced in 1966, Tom Cat fell off Blue Notice’s launch schedule altogether till 1980, when producer Michael Cuscuna (who described it as “one of Lee’s finest sessions with a superb cast and some of the man’s best writing”) liberated it from the tape vaults. Although not as well-known as different Morgan albums from the identical interval, the often-overlooked Tom Cat captured the flamboyant trumpeter in dazzling type.
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