Search For The New Land

Search for the New Land was recorded at the same time at The Sidewinder, Morgan’s wildly successful album that solidified his hard bop / latin influenced style. The Search for the New Land was held back and not released for a year after The Sidewinder. It represents a possible alternate future for Morgan’s work and makes me wonder where he would have gone had this album been released before, or instead of, The Sidewinder.

The title track is very unusual, I haven’t heard anything quite like it before. It consists of a series of improvisational vignettes that are framed in a recurring chorus. This requires each soloist to depart from the chorus and return to the same point at the end of their solo. Descriptions like this are probably quite useless in describing the effect, but in support I would add that I have been selecting this track quite a bit on my ipod.

In my collection, Morgan generally plays in one of two categories, the BeBop early Dizzy Gillespie stuff, and the Hard Bop swinging Art Blakey style. Not to say that Morgan is derivative, merely influenced. This represents a third distinct style that might be related to an avant-garde jazz album he did with Grachan Moncur called Evolution, which I have yet to hear.

Search For The New Land

Sound Quality: 8/10

18 December 2006 | Lee Morgan, Music, Jazz | Comments