Guys I can't stress this enough, if you make a record, you should also release the damn record too.

"This is another one of those Blue Note big brain decisions where after the success of Morgan’s 1963 album The Sidewinder had been a huge commercial and financial success, which almost single-handedly helped keep Blue Note solvent, for a while at least. Blue Note then hedged their bets. While Sidewinder continued to sell, Blue Note then  released Morgan’s most musically advanced title (in my opinion), In Search Of The New Land in 1964,  while hoping that his boogaloo-continuity title, The Rumproller (1965), would recreate the success of Sidewinder.  Lightening, however, failed to strike twice, and The Rumproller didn’t make the tills roll.

In the mean time, Cornbread and other more mainstream Morgan recordings for Blue Note remained unreleased, piling up in the Blue Note vaults.  This hiatus left behind a  rich seam of Lee Morgan-led  material recorded between 1963 and 1967, which would be mined first by Liberty, and later, curated by Michael Cuscuna for United Artists for the  Blue Note Classics LT series, with many rarely seen alternative cover issues in Japan (more on which anon)." - London Jazz Collector

Tom Cat would be one of those records. Forced to live out in obscurity, alternating album covers, only found by Japanese record collectors and enthusiasts. As more of this stuff gets released we can finally start to comb through the wreckage and see what a fine writer Lee Morgan really was. He had a fiery grace to his writing which you can tell is accented by various different muses.

This piece Exotique is a burner in Bb minor, a vampy tune with a dirgelike blues intro, the head in the beginning reminds me of Wayne Shorters Armageddon. A tune which can go so many places despite it just being a little 16 bar number. The whole band here is operating at a pace rarely seen even in this era of blue note recording. Art Blakey kicks everyones ass, Jackie is Jackieing, Curtis is cool elegance like always and McCoy and Lee have some fun in every single one of these compositions. JAZZ CAN BE FUN.  Love it.

Hopefully more people dive into the collection that Lee left and Blue Note finally released and can enjoy one of the greatest jazz composers ever.

Hope you enjoy!

Jake