Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture

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This is the first biography of the jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan (1938-72). He was a prodigy: recruited to Dizzy Gillespie’s big band while still a teenager, joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers not much after, by his early-20s Morgan had played on four continents and dozens of albums. The trumpeter would go on to cultivate a personal and highly influential style, and to make records - most notably The Sidewinder - which would sell amounts almost unheard of in jazz. While what should have been Morgan’s most successful years were hampered by a heroin addiction, the ascendant black liberation movement of the late-60s gave the musician a new, political impulse, and he returned to the jazz scene to become a vociferous campaigner for black musicians’ rights and representation. But Morgan’s personal life remained troubled, and during a fight with his girlfriend at a New York club, he was shot and killed, aged 33.