The Complete Mercury Max Roach Plus Four Sessions & The Complete Vee Jay Lee Morgan—Wayne Shorter Sessions by Zoë Anglesey

The Complete Mercury Max Roach Plus Four Sessions comprises seven hours and 95 tracks, while The Complete Vee Jay Lee Morgan-Wayne Shorter Sessions racks up 77 cuts for six hours of dream jazz. I say “dream” because hard bop innovators Max Roach, Lee Morgan, and Wayne Shorter, including their stellar cohorts, play graced with a sense of tasteful competition and concern for adulterated perfection. This adds up to art; art takes time to present and here it is. These two Mosaic box sets in limited editions of 5,000 copies for true connoisseurs of jazz place listeners inside the recording studio as never before. Most references don’t even mention Wayne Shorter’s first sign-on as leader: his contribution is too superb for continued obscurity. A pre-Motown record label, Vee Jay of Chicago was the first African-American owned company to take markets and distribution seriously. In 1959 Vee Jay pulled in trumpeter Lee Morgan, 21, and Wayne Shorter, then NYU grad just out of the army, both newly enrolled in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. The Vee Jay sessions include “The Young Lions”, “Here’s Lee Morgan,” “Expoobident,” “Introducing Wayne Shorter,” “Second Genesis,” and “Wayning Moments.” All cuts are sequenced in correct chronological order and restore six previously unissued tracks. Francis Wolff, Chuck Stewart, and Ted Williams capture the moods in art photos—how sharp the vines, Blakey sitting next to baby Cedar Walton, Wayne composing, revising between tracks. The music is glorious—all of it. The Complete Mercury Max Roach Plus Four Sessions start in New York in 1956, just three months after the tragic deaths of Roach’s band mates Clifford Brown and Richie Powell, and end in Paris several years later. The four are the unsung Kenny Dorham, Sonny Rollins (whose lyrical breathy blowing is just too fine), Ray Bryant and George Morrow. In 1958, Roach pulled in Memphis greats Booker Little, George Coleman, the Turrentine Brothers and Julian Priester. Noticeably, the Max Roach drum solos swell as voluminous miracles in velocity or finely drawn minimalist studies in sonic dynamics.