11 October : The Sixth Sense

Lee Morgan’s sessions for The Sixth Sense were in 1967. The album came out in 1969 but a new pressing was released in the US in July 1970, and reviewed in Melody Maker by Richard Williams in the 17 October 1970 edition. The album is, said Williams

The kind of straight-ahead honesty jazz has always been said to be in danger of losing; and perfect music to play after a surfeit of jazz-rock.

That’s a fair assessment. As I’ve said before, you can’t go wrong with a Blue Note album, and this is a good album by first-class musicians. It doesn’t break new ground, but not everything has to. And yet… what was perfectly good in 1967 was behind the times by late 1970. It isn’t the comparison with Miles Davis that dates it, but the comparison with Freddie Hubbard also. I like this album, but it’s pretty conventional, and at no point did it give me the ‘wow’ response.

Discogs calls this ‘Hard Bop’, but only two tracks strike me as falling into that loose description: Short Count and Anti Climax. It looks like Psychedelic was named by the marketing department–there’s nothing lysergic about it. While listening through (twice) it struck me that what was revolutionary and difficult in BeBop and Post-Bop jazz sounds a lot like muzak now: fifty years on, and I’ve heard this stuff in bars, either raw or sampled, and it doesn’t sound so out-there anymore.

Anyway, I enjoyed it, and if I saw a cheap copy somewhere I’d probably buy it and play it, but it isn’t on my ‘must-buy’ list.

I listened on Spotify, and there’s a YouTube playlist