50 Jazz Blues Licks is an exclusive series of video
Lee Morgan came blasting out of the Philadelphia jazz scene as a 17-year-old wunderkind in Dizzy Gillespie’s mid-nineteen fifties band. Jazz critic Nat Hentoff recalls first hearing Morgan as the trumpeter played a dazzling cadenza on Gillespie’s signature tune “A Night In Tunisia,” which, to put things in perspective, is a little like first hearing some new guitarist because Jimi Hendrix has just hired him to take the solo on “Voodoo Child.” Morgan gained further attention through two separate stints with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and recorded prolifically for Blue Note as a solo artist and sideman throughout the 1960s. Murdered by an ex-girlfriend in 1971 in what David Rosenthal, author of Hard Bop, describes as “a scene straight out of ‘Frankie and Johnny,’” Morgan was considered by many to epitomize the hard bop school, and his success with “The Sidewinder” in 1964 made such boogaloo grooves de rigeur for his labelmates and many other musicians over the next half-decade. The original recording is in Eb; I’ve placed this Morgan-inspired lick in F7, leading from the I over to the IV chord.
Read on for the full
Video Guitar Lesson
If you like these