"THE SIDEWINDER" (1963)

"The Sidewinder" may have the distinction of being the only jazz standard that began its life written on toilet paper. Trumpeter Lee Morgan, typical of his tendency to procrastinate, composed the title tune for his best-selling album of the same name, The Sidewinder, at the album’s recording session. In late 1963 he signed a new recording contract with Blue Note Records after a hiatus of over three years, during which his severe heroin addiction caused him to stop playing music. In 1956, when he was only 18 years old, he began recording with Blue Note as a session leader and he showed such promise that he was deemed the successor to hard bop trumpeter Clifford Brown, who had died in a auto accident earlier that year. However, like so many talented young jazz musicians of that time, Morgan’s rising star was sunk by his escalating drug usage, and by 1961 he had pawned his trumpet for drug money. In the fall of 1963 he enrolled in a heroin detox program in an effort to get his life and career back on track, and Alfred Lion, co-founder of Blue Note, was willing to take a chance on Morgan and signed him for three albums as session leader. At the time Lion couldn’t have known the financial importance of that decision for Blue Note.

Blue Note permitted Morgan to choose his sidemen, and in late December 1963, he assembled tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, pianist Barry Harris, bassist Bob Cranshaw, and percussionist Billy Higgins for the first album's recording session. He planned to record original compositions and already had written four new tunes, "Totem Pole," "Boy, What a Night," "Hocus-Pocus," and "Gary’s Notebook," but knew they would not be sufficient to fill the LP. Consequently, "The Sidewinder" was conceived as padding. Jeffrey McMillan in his new definitive biography about Lee Morgan, Delightfulee, describes how the song came to be written: "The Sidewinder," the shuffling blues anthem that would be Morgan’s most memorable composition, was composed at the session and hastily written down, as Morgan liked to tell it later on, on a piece of toilet tissue. Cranshaw remembered Morgan excusing himself for a bathroom break at [recording engineer Rudy] Van Gelder’s home during the date. Things had been going well. They had already recorded three of the four tunes they had prepared, but it was clear that even with "Gary’s Notebook" the band would not have enough recorded material to make a record. When Morgan had been in the lavatory for twenty minutes, Cranshaw began to wonder if he was okay; perhaps he had gotten high and passed out. Shortly thereafter Morgan emerged from the bathroom brandishing a new composition scrawled on a few squares of toilet paper. The tune was a blues drawn out to a twenty-four-bar length, with a melody that was easy to learn. After adding an introduction, solos by Morgan, Henderson, Harris and Cranshaw, they could fill ten minutes, enough to fill the LP."

Originally, the word "sidewinder" was used to refer to a species of horned rattlesnake with a venomous bite, but apparently that was not what Morgan had in mind when he decided on the title for his song. McMillan said, "Despite the tune’s slithery movement, Morgan held that the inspiration for the title was not reptilian: "The tune kind of put me in mind of the sidewinder – you know, the ‘bad guy’ on television," he said. "There’s a snake called the sidewinder, but I was thinking of the bad guy." "Sidewinder" was a generic name sometimes given to the villains in television Westerns of the 1950s."

The Sidewinder album was released in July 1964. Even with only a modest advertising campaign, by October the record was selling faster than Blue Note could press it. The album steadily climbed the charts and by the final week of 1964 had reached #35 on Billboard’s LP charts, an unusual achievement for a jazz album, and it peaked at #25. Since the title track was the primary reason for the album’s success, Blue Note issued that track as a 45 rpm single in an effort to meet demand, and it entered the Billboard Hot 100 list for singles, reaching #81, another rare event for a jazz track. It also was unusual for a new jazz track to be taken up by the advertising agencies, but that happened to "The Sidewinder" when Chrysler used it as background music for high-profile television commercials during the 1965 World Series. The success of "The Sidewinder" revived the struggling finances of both Lee Morgan and Blue Note, and likely saved the record label from bankruptcy. Morgan became a cornerstone of the Blue Note label with 25 albums, many of which were financially successful, but none struck commercial gold like "The Sidewinder." Click on this link to hear Morgan’s original Blue Note recording of "The Sidewinder": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrp94IU3quI

"The Sidewinder" revived Morgan’s career and he went on to record and tour extensively. In an interview discussing his recent success, he said, "‘Sidewinder’ has made a big difference. It came at the right time for me, a time when I really needed something. I’d been off the scene for a time, and it was like a gift from God to have this happen." The song, drawing from soul-jazz, Latin boogaloo, blues, and R&B in addition to Morgan’s trademark hard bop, was unlike his prior recordings and signaled the evolution of Morgan’s style. Steve Huey at www.allmusic.com writes, "As his original compositions began to take in elements of blues and R&B, he made greater use of space and developed an infectiously funky rhythmic sense. He also found ways to mimic human vocal inflections by stuttering, slurring his articulations, and employing half-valved sound effects. Toward the end of his career, Morgan was increasingly moving into modal music and free bop, hinting at the avant-garde but remaining grounded in tradition."

After the success of "The Sidewinder," Morgan continued to struggle with drug addiction over the next few years, but by 1972 was proud that he had overcome his heroin habit. He was recording and performing steadily with his band and pursuing new ideas for musical compositions, including writing the score for a black opera. Tragically, he did not live to develop his ideas; he was murdered on February 19, 1972. David Rosenthal begins his jazz history book, Hard Bop, with that event, "...in a scene straight out of "Frankie and Johnny," trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot dead by his mistress at Slug’s, a jazz club on New York City’s Lower East Side. Morgan was thirty-three years old. His death – spectacular in jazz not so much because he was young as because it involved a woman instead of drugs..." The woman, Helen More, who was Morgan’s long-time girlfriend, shot him between sets at Slugs’ where he was performing that night. They had been arguing; Morgan was seeing another woman and he wanted to end his relationship with More. Jeffrey McMillan in Delightfulee relates an eyewitness account by drummer Billy Harper of the shooting, "It was eerie," recalled Harper, who was already on the bandstand and ready to play. "It was like one of those Wild West showdowns in the movies." Morgan turned to face her, probably ready to resume their argument, when Helen drew his .32 Harrington & Richardson revolver from her purse. Morgan taunted her, saying that she could try and shoot him – that she had the gun, but he had the bullets. Helen fired a single shot at Lee from close range. "We heard a little pop – not a big thing, just a pop, I didn’t even know if it was a gun," Harper said. The bullet pierced Morgan’s chest, lung, and aorta, before lodging in his spine. He stumbled and fell to the floor slowly as blood filled his chest cavity and spilled on to the ground. Though some witnesses claim to have heard the "pop, pop, pop" of multiple discharges, there was but a single bullet fired from the pistol, but it inflicted such severe damage that Morgan lost consciousness and was gone soon thereafter."

McMillan goes on to write, "A young, confident, African-American artist with a unique voice and persona, struggling against drugs, racism, and the difficulties of making a living playing jazz, Morgan’s story is as critical to the history of jazz as his sound – a blend of aggression, lyricism, humor, swagger, and playfulness. Morgan was one of jazz’s most important postbebop trumpeters and, according to Dizzy Gillespie, was, along with Freddie Hubbard, the last major stylist." McMillan ends his biography with Morgan’s own words, "If it wasn’t for music, this country would have blown up a long time ago, in fact, the whole world. Music is the only thing that spans across all ethnic groups and all languages. Music is the only thing that awakens the dead man and charms the savage beast. Without it, this would be a hell of a world!"

To learn more about Lee Morgan’s life and music, click on the following link to listen to an interview of biographer Jeffrey McMillan by Mark Lynch, host of WICN’s Inquiry: http://www.wicn.org/audio/inquiry-jeffery-s-mcmillan-delightfulee-the-li...