Sunday, February 10, 2008
Jazz House Party with Morgan and Montgomery
These are my two favorite live jazz albums for the past two or three years. They both feature the outstanding hard bop pianist Harold Mabern and that might be a major factor why they are so recurrent on my playlists. Mabern is like a master acrobat juggler illusionist who keeps many musical ideas in air, never letting you see him drop. This makes him a good match for the likes of Montgomery and Morgan.
My first exposure to Montgomery was as a pre-teenager listening to my parents A&M CTI albums like Road Song. His guitar had such an individual voice like the most popular straight ahead pop-singers do. But years later, I heard a Montgomery from an era just prior to his sanitized take on Beatles songs and alike, one on So Much Guitar! that peeled out streams of ideas and a kind of energetic furor. That is the Wes Montgomery in quartet setting in these Paris settings and other posthumous releases of his work from the mid sixties I have been encountering recently.
But Montgomery's set is almost sedate to the moments of fire on Lee Morgan's live at the Lighthouse. There are only twelve music tracks on this three CD set, all of which are at least ten minutes minutes long. Bennie Maupin plays a range of wind instruments. There is both a commonality and a variety to these tracks. This feels like a band laying it on the line. The kind of the hard bop that Morgan is associated with from his Art Blakey years is evident throughout but there is something else with songs come forward with such strong live-for-the-moment fortitude and resolution, yet still given the opportunity and time to for bassist Jymie Merrit and drummer Mickey Roker to fully explore. And they make sure to pull out The Sidewinder the funky boogaloo that helped Morgan get recognized and allowed him to capitalize on through the mid-sixties.
Both of these live sets are not focused on the music of what the artists are most known or popularized for. Perhaps that is a reason that attracts me to them along with the vitality and energy executed in these recordings, as much as I like their popish sides.
Both artists died within a couple of years after being captured here. Morgan in a dramatic drug-related shooting by his girlfriend in a NY jazz club at 33 and Montgomery from a heart attack at 45.
I can't find a YouTube clip of Morgan with his later working bands, so this earlier excerpt of him with the Jazz Messengers will have to suffice. But the Montgomery piece is very reflective of the kind of energy found on the Paris set.
posted by well-executed buffet at 7:09 PM
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