Last featured in Marlbank in 2014 when Terell Stafford (above) was touring with drummer David Lyttle in Ireland it’s been a while since we’ve heard from the Miami-born Chicago-raised trumpeter on record, some four years since his Strayhorn tribute. His records as a leader go back to his first surfacing on the Candid label in the mid-1990s and before that appearing as a young gun as a sideman with Bobby Watson and Shirley Scott.
No prizes for guesses given the pun in the title that this new album pays tribute to the iconic musical legacy of Lee Morgan. Actually it’s a double pun given the Philadelphia city of brotherly love tag, Philly the place of Morgan’s birth and where Stafford is a long time director of jazz studies at the city’s Temple University on this tasteful and lively quintet album of nine tunes eight of which are by or associated with Morgan.
Produced by bassist John Clayton and recorded at Systems Two in Brooklyn in May last year Stafford’s band has Tim Warfield on tenor saxophone (burning on ‘Petty Larceny’); Bruce Barth, piano; Peter Washington double bass; and Dana Hall, drums. Beginning with The Sidewinder tune ‘Hocus Pocus’ followed by Search for the New Land’s ‘Mr Kenyatta’ Stafford is a pulsating presence the band smooth as silk and just the right side of restless behind him, the emphasis on swing and hard blowing on ‘Petty Larceny’, Hall coming alive from within the heart of the Blakey tradition, a tune that features on the Jazz Messengers album The Freedom Rider.
Also on the album are Alex Kramer tune ‘Candy,’ one of the tunes most associated with Morgan played on the 1958-released album of the same name, here led in by Barth with a lightly romantic dreamy line and then a beautifully gathered ringingly pure-toned trumpet solo from Stafford that dissolves the distance of years to dust, a big highlight of the album. Stafford also feeds in his own tune ‘Favor’ that fits the mood.
‘Yes I Can, No You Can’t’ along with riotous album closer ‘Speedball’ are two selections from 1965 Morgan Blue Note album The Gigolo, the remaining Morgan material ‘Stop Start’ drawn from The Procrastinator while ‘Carolyn’ featured on Hank Mobley’s No Room For Squares.
A must for Morgan and hard bop fans: Stafford certainly knows how to honour the past and draw on its best traditions without preserving it in aspic. The music comes alive all over again in his very capable hands.
Stephen Graham
Released on CD on 16 June