Something Like This: Lee Morgan's "Live at the Lighthouse"
A three-hour morass of head-expanding live jazz
This 3-hour monolith (there goes half the readerbase) wasn't originally on my list of albums to review, but after a monumental listen the other day, I knew I had to at least give it a try.
Let's begin at the end (at least the end of the 3-hour version - more on the two other editions of this set later), with "The Sidewinder." This tune's fun and accessible vibe rocketed jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan to fame, despite its 10-minute length, when it was used for a Chrysler commercial in 1963. Morgan, then only 25, was suddenly the star artist of Blue Note Records, provided with an unusual amount of time and resources to develop his style. He took things further with later albums on the label, like Search for the New Land (1964), whose title track definitely displays the strangeness and complexity that he would fully achieve later in his career by the July 1970 recording date.
"Sidewinder" was by far his most famous track, so it was one of his more requested tunes at live shows. The decision to put it after everything else on the album is clever, rooting the listener back in reality after the more abstract sounds of discs 2 and 3.
This strongly contrasts the third-to-last track, "Yunjanna." Named after a type of Buddhist yoga practitioner, it's anything but fun and accessible, serving up a subtle mood of - wait, hold on, I have a picture.
The whole third disc ("Aon," "Yunjanna," and "416 East 10th Street," with the exception of "Sidewinder") is full of the perplexing late-night self-searching moods that jazz excels at. You can practically feel the smoky nightclub and smell the Pacific, not to mention the Hermosa Beach nightlife.
All the song titles on this album seem to be esoteric references. Just for instance, "Aon," which starts out deceptively cheerful but turns into thrilling chaos after a few minutes, refers to a son of Poseidon in Greek mythology. The playful "416 East 10th Street" is the address of a six-story apartment building in the East Village, Manhattan. On the other discs, "Nommo" are ancestor spirits sacred to the Dogon people of Mali, and "Speedball" is hard-boiled '60s-'70s slang for mixing a stimulant and a depressant, such as cocaine or methamphetamines with heroin.
Morgan's band gets time to stretch out, too: sax player Bennie Maupin actually wrote "Yunjanna" and "416," as well as three other songs on the album, and pianist Harold Mabern wrote "Aon." Maupin played on Miles Davis' genre-defining Bitches Brew, one of the most successful jazz albums of all time, and the other members of the quintet, bassist Jymie Merritt and drummer Mickey Roker, went on to have star-studded careers and big-name collaborations.
Backtracking further, the second disc ("Nommo" through "I Remember Britt") is a bit more uptempo, but it also works with the knotty, complex post-bop arrangements that the whole set obsesses with. This disc contains two songs that were actually on the original 1971 double album, "Nommo" and "Neophilia." They occupied an entire side of vinyl each, making up a 2LP double album, with two tracks from the first disc here on the other vinyl.
On the other hand, if you're a real fanatic, a 2021 8-CD box set compiles all the recordings that were made during Morgan's epic 3-day, 12-set residency at the Los Angeles nightclub The Lighthouse, with countless different versions of each song featured here. The club itself is a historic venue: this is one of many classic jazz albums recorded there. Other guests include Grant Green and an early, unknown Miles Davis.
Finally, we arrive at the first disc, which contains some of the best material in the entire set. "The Beehive" creates a pretty good impression of, well, a beehive, with instruments weaving in, out, and around each other. It also seems to be influenced by Morgan's musical idol, fellow trumpeter Clifford Brown, who had his life tragically cut short in 1956 while he was reaching his musical peak. Coincidentally, Brown also had a notable live album involving 10-20 minute songs at a venue called The Beehive.
"Absolutions" is a 20-minute deep emotional journey. "Peyote" (I don't have to tell you what that one is an esoteric reference to) and "Speedball" burn with power. Even the spoken introduction is kind of fun - the man's speaking voice is strikingly similar to the way he plays trumpet, with pauses for breath at slightly odd times.
This album explores territory Morgan also covered on his 1972 self-titled posthumous final album, which plays with long tracks, complicated solos and buildups, and a high degree of harmonic complexity. It features some big names in oddball jazz at the time, like Bobbi Humphrey and Grachan Moncur III.
Unfortunately, Morgan’s journey into the avant-garde was cut short when he was shot outside a gig in New York in 1972 - by his own girlfriend, no less. He left behind a legacy of innovation on the trumpet, pushing towards the intellectual, subdued style that would later be known as post-bop.
It's live documents like this one that really show a jazz musician's strengths: sure, he's good in the studio, but can he do the same tricks for a paying audience? (Yes - yes, he can.)