Lee Morgan: The Sidewinder (Blue Note Essential series) [BLUE NOTE / EMI]

Why you'll love it

This Blue Note Essential series edition presents the stereo album, pressed in Germany. The Sidewinder became Blue Note's best-selling record ever, reaching No. 25 on the Billboard chart, and its title track crossed into the Hot 100.

This edition

• Blue Note Essential series
• Stereo
• Pressed in Germany

About the album

Blue Note pressed 4,000 copies at first, which seemed plenty for a hard bop trumpet record. They sold out in three or four days, and producer Alfred Lion suddenly had a hit on his hands, the kind that kept a small jazz label very comfortably in business.

Morgan cut it at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs with a crack quintet: Joe Henderson on tenor, Barry Harris on piano, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Billy Higgins on drums. The title track is the hook, a 24-bar groove with a boogaloo strut that the Penguin Guide to Jazz called sinuous and stinging, and it went on to soundtrack a Chrysler TV ad. The rest of the record is pure hard bop: "Totem Pole" rides a Latin-tinged swing, "Gary's Notebook" burns along at a brisk clip, "Boy, What A Night" swaggers, and "Hocus-Pocus" closes with Morgan's brightest, sharpest playing.

The Penguin Guide placed it in its Core Collection with a crown, and Blue Note spent years afterwards asking Morgan for another one just like it. We'd ask too, frankly; it's the one that keeps leaving the shop.

Also at Kops: more Lee Morgan on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Blue Note (cat# 0743886), a reissue of the 1964 album.