By Steve Provizer

Prodigy, post-Parker junkie, dead by homicide at a young age (1938-1972). Whatever. The myth shouldn’t crowd out the player. Musically, Lee Morgan was a muthahfucka.

No matter what influences he brought into the music — funk, modal, Latin, free — Morgan always sounded like Morgan, and the quality of his playing was always superb (apart from a period of chops trouble resulting from a drug-related tooth debacle).

The mid-’50s Philadelphia in which Morgan grew up was an active and supportive jazz scene. He started playing the trumpet at 13 and by 14 he was playing at sessions, first at the Jazz Workshop at the Heritage House and then at Music City. He crossed paths with Clifford Brown, with whom he hung out for about two years, until Brown’s death on the road. He gigged around town with fellow teens bassist Spanky DeBrest and McCoy Tyner. Jess McMillan’s authoritative article on Morgan’s days in Philly says that when Chet Baker came to town, the 15-year-old Morgan cut him — “blew him completely out of the room.”

Dizzy Gillespie also made the Music City Club sessions, and when he heard Morgan, who was at that point 18, he recruited him for his big band.

From the beginning, Morgan’s unique, instantly recognizable tone was present: slightly hard-bitten, slightly burnished, usually aggressive, but occasionally sliding into sultry. There are times, throughout his career, when he played things that might have been played by someone else — runs by Bill Hardman or Donald Byrd, or repeated phrases with small variations, à la Clifford. But then, you add in the rest of his vocabulary — half-valves, notes spit out like expletives, deft ornamentation, trills, false fingerings, lightning fast triplets — and you have a distinctive grammar and vocabulary. Put all that under the umbrella of Morgan’s tone and even a fairly typical hard bop pattern rings differently in the ear, singular and original.

Just a few arbitrary examples.

Morgan’s first album as a leader and, in fact, his first recording, was Indeed for Blue Note in November 1956. Horace Silver is on piano, Wilber Ware on bass, Clarence Sharp on alto, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. The first tune is a ballad, the second is a burner. Here’s “The Lady:”

Next is “Reggie of Chester.”

His approach to the ballad suggests, to me, a strong Brown influence. That not only means note choice, but modulating his tone to accommodate those choices. In “Reggie,” he is clearly on terra firma. The Morgan tone and syntax is solid — influences seem like afterthoughts.

In April 1957, Morgan recorded several tracks with the Gillespie big band that ended up on an LP called Dizzy in Greece (last three tracks on Side 2). Why they called it Dizzy in Greece, who knows, although it did give Diz a chance to get his Zorba on.

Here’s Morgan taking a nice solo on “That’s All.”

At this point, Morgan began to record, often. Five albums were released under his name in 1957. One of these was The Cooker. “Just One of Those Things,” from that LP, has to be heard:

Here’s Morgan burning through rhythm changes on C.T.A, also in 1957. Sonny Clarke is on piano, Doug Watkins on bass, Art Taylor on drums.

There’s so much material. I’ll wrap this up with a very pretty Latin tune Morgan wrote called “Ceora,” from a 1965 release. With him are Hank Mobley, tenor; Herbie Hancock, piano; Larry Ridley, bass; and Billy Higgins, drums.

FOR TRUMPET PLAYERS: There are a bunch of transcriptions of Lee Morgan solos that you will have a ball playing available on Jeff Helgeson’s blog: jazztrumpetsolos.com.

Steve Provizer writes on a range of subjects, most often the arts. He is a musician and blogs about jazz here.