The Sidewinder - Lee Morgan

Recorded on December 21, 1963 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, The Sidewinder features Lee Morgan leading a quintet of Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone, Barry Harris on piano, Bob Cranshaw on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums — a group that had never played together before the session. All five tracks are Morgan originals, with the boogaloo-driven title track reportedly added as an afterthought to complete the date. That track became Blue Note's best-selling single, reaching number eighty-one on the Billboard Hot 100 and helping rescue the label from financial difficulty — its initial pressing of four thousand copies sold out in days. The album peaked at number twenty-five on the Billboard pop chart, a rare achievement for a hard bop record. Morgan, who had debuted on Blue Note at eighteen and served apprenticeships with Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, was in the middle of a creative comeback after personal setbacks, and the album established him as a commercially viable bandleader. The remaining tracks — "Totem Pole," "Gary's Notebook," "Boy, What a Night," and "Hocus Pocus" — range from Latin-inflected swingers to uptempo hard bop, with Henderson's tenor and Harris's piano contributing solos throughout.