Delightfulee

Delightfulee was assembled from two 1966 sessions that caught Lee Morgan working in contrasting settings: a tight quintet with Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Bob Cranshaw and Billy Higgins, and a larger, more ambitious ensemble featuring Wayne Shorter, Phil Woods, Philly Joe Jones and unusual horn colors like French horn and bass clarinet. The record arrived after the huge crossover success of "The Sidewinder" had made Morgan Blue Note's most commercially valuable young trumpeter, and it finds him balancing that visibility with genuinely exploratory hard-bop writing rather than repeating a hit formula. Original pieces like "Ca-Lee-So" and "Zambia" sit beside a soulful reading of the Beatles' "Yesterday" and the Broadway standard "Sunrise, Sunset," reflecting jazz's growing appetite at the time 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 the noted critic Leonard Feather situate the record within Morgan's ongoing growth as composer and bandleader. Though somewhat overshadowed commercially by his earlier boogaloo hits, the album is valued by listeners as a showcase of Morgan's compositional range and his gift for pairing top-tier sidemen in adventurous small- and medium-group hard bop.