The Sidewinder was recorded on December 21, 1963, at Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio. It was released in 1964 and became one of the best-selling jazz records Blue Note had ever produced, reaching audiences beyond the existing jazz community and providing the label with the commercial stability that allowed it to continue making more challenging records.

The commercial success has been held against the album. Critics who arrived at Blue Note through its more formally radical work have treated The Sidewinder with a certain condescension — too groovy, too accessible, the record that the less adventurous listener gravitates toward before moving on to the harder material.

This is wrong. The Sidewinder is a great record.

The Title Track

The opening bass figure by Bob Cranshaw is among the most immediately recognizable moments in the Blue Note catalogue. Cranshaw plays four notes in a syncopated boogaloo rhythm, and before Morgan enters you already understand what the record is going to be: swinging hard, rooted in the blues, and built to move bodies as well as minds.

Morgan’s entrance is confident in a way that only comes from a musician who knows exactly what the music needs and has the technique to provide it. He was twenty-five years old. He had been playing professionally since he was fifteen, had been in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers before he was twenty, had already made a dozen records. He had earned the confidence.

The melody of “The Sidewinder” is a twenty-four-bar blues — the boogaloo rhythm gives it a quality that had not been prominent in hard bop before, a directness that owes as much to rhythm and blues as to bebop. Alfred Lion initially resisted releasing it as a single, thinking it was too pop. He was convinced otherwise, and the decision changed Blue Note’s financial position for the next several years.

Joe Henderson

The second voice in the front line is Joe Henderson, who had recently arrived in New York from Lima, Ohio, and who was rapidly establishing himself as one of the most distinctive tenor saxophonists of his generation.

Henderson’s relationship to the harmonic material of hard bop was different from that of his contemporaries. Where most tenor players of the period worked within the changes — implying the chords through their line choices — Henderson worked around and through them, treating the chord changes as a field of possibility rather than a prescribed path. His solos on The Sidewinder demonstrate this approach with particular clarity: he is always recognizably inside the music, but he is finding angles that nobody had found before.

His entrance on the title track, after Morgan’s solo, is one of the great moments in the Blue Note catalogue. He plays the first phrase with a slight delay — a suspension over the rhythm that creates a momentary harmonic ambiguity — and then lands on a note that resolves everything, at which point the music is in a different place from where it started.

The Rest of the Record

The album’s remaining tracks extend the boogaloo-hard bop synthesis in different directions. “Totem Pole” is the most adventurous — a minor blues with an unusual structure that gives Henderson particular room. “Gary’s Notebook” is more conventional but shows the quintet’s ability to swing hard at medium tempo, which is the test that most separates the competent from the genuinely good.

Billy Higgins’s drumming throughout is the best performance on the record, and on a record with Morgan and Henderson playing at this level, that is saying something. Higgins had the ability to swing hard while leaving space — to make time feel inevitable and loose simultaneously — that is the rarest quality in jazz drumming. He gives the boogaloo rhythm on “The Sidewinder” a quality of inevitability that makes the music feel like it has always existed and Morgan merely discovered it.

The Legacy

Morgan was shot and killed in 1972, at thirty-three, by his girlfriend during a break between sets at a Manhattan club. He left behind a catalogue that spans the full arc of hard bop and post-hard bop jazz. The Sidewinder is the record most people encounter first, and it is a worthy introduction: accessible, beautifully played, and more formally sophisticated than its commercial success has led people to believe.