Delightfulee

Delightfulee was assembled from two 1966 Van Gelder Studio sessions that found Lee Morgan working in two very different settings: a tight quintet with Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw and Billy Higgins, and a larger, more ambitious nonet-plus session featuring Wayne Shorter, Phil Woods, Philly Joe Jones and a horn section arranged with unusual colors like French horn and bass clarinet. The album arrived at a pivotal moment in Morgan's career, coming after the massive crossover success of "The Sidewinder" (1964) had made him Blue Note's most commercially valuable young trumpeter, and it shows him balancing that newfound visibility with genuinely exploratory hard-bop writing rather than repeating a hit formula. Original compositions like "Ca-Lee-So" and "Zambia" sit alongside a soulful reading of the Beatles' "Yesterday" and the Broadway standard "Sunrise, Sunset," reflecting the era's growing jazz appetite for pop and show tunes. Morgan, a Philadelphia prodigy who had already passed through Dizzy Gillespie's band and the Jazz Messengers before his Blue Note stardom, plays with the fluid, blues-drenched brilliance and biting tone that made him one of the defining hard-bop trumpet voices of the 1960s. Liner notes by noted critic Leonard Feather situate the record within Morgan's ongoing evolution as both composer and bandleader. Though somewhat overshadowed commercially by the earlier boogaloo hits, Delightfulee is valued by collectors and critics as a showcase of Morgan's compositional range and his gift for pairing top-tier sidemen in service of adventurous small- and medium-group hard bop.