Lee Morgan ‎– Search For The New Land (1973 Stereo)

“All that seriousness and intensity is embodied in the album’s mesmerising title track, which, at nearly 16 minutes long, takes up most of the first side. From its opening moments, it’s clear this is no boogaloo bounce or hard-bop burner. Cymbals shimmer, bass lets forth a low arco drone, piano and guitar glisten like motes in a sunbeam, setting a mirage-like background for the emergence of Morgan’s wistful melody for twin horns.

Theme stated twice, Workman cuts in with a driving riff, Higgins’ whip-crack snare dances around a tough waltz and Hancock slices off stabbing chords, before horns sketch out a second, sprightlier theme and the band dissolves back into the opening aubade. This cyclical structure of theme, vamp, dissolve, theme plays out over the next 10-plus-minutes, with Shorter, Morgan, Hancock and Green each taking an unhurried, masterful solo in the vamp section.

Morgan’s solo is a revelation. Coming in with a typically pristine and strident tone, he quickly seems to pull back from the high-energy, note-dense style with which he was usually associated, settling into a more sensitive consideration of tone and breath, overblowing one moment, issuing a hushed huff the next.  The group interplay throughout Morgan’s solo is breath-taking: a few bars in, he slides into a rapid trill, eliciting a sudden, excited prance from Hancock and firework snare cracks from Higgins that sound and feel remarkably like the liberated free-jazz drum style of Sunny Murray.

In fact, in its own elegant way, “Search For The New Land” was every bit as radical as the abstract free-jazz then gathering pace in the mid-60s, negotiating a fresh and surprising relationship with hard bop that only a master of the form like Morgan could have contemplated. A new land, a new sound, a whole new way of being.” – excerpt from Daniel Spicer’s review of the album, February 2024, Everything Jazz

Label: Blue Note – BST-84169
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Stereo
Country: US
Released: 1973

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