On a chilly night in February 1972, the 33-year-old trumpeter Lee Morgan was in the middle of a gig at the jazz club Slugs on East Third Street when he was shot and killed by his long-time girlfriend, thus ending one of the most promising careers of his generation. The parallels between Morgan and Clifford Brown, the trumpeter who had been his greatest influence and, briefly, his teacher, were tragically ironic, because Brown had died a similarly violent death 16 years earlier in a car crash.

Like Brown, Morgan’s music has been perennially popular since he recorded it, and much of his most crucial work, the 25 albums he recorded for Blue Note, has been in print steadily for more than 40 years. Yet this is a good time to remember the trumpeter, who is now the subject of a formal biography, “Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture” by Tom Perchard (Quartet Books). Morgan is also prominently featured in a new DVD, “Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Live in ’58” (Reelin’ In rhe Years Productions).

During the course of a career that essentially began just a few months after Brown’s death in 1956, Lee Morgan established himself as the most extravagantly talented trumpeter, and perhaps the single most important musician, of the new genre of jazz that came to be referred to as “hard bop.”This new bebop was a much more direct, more visceral music than the original bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and more overtly emotional and muscular than the classically-influenced, West Coast-associated “cool jazz” that developed in the wake of bop.

Where first-generation bop was comparatively baroque in its complexity, hard bop was leaner and meaner, and Morgan was its most dynamic representative. Where bebop had strengthened jazz’s ties to the blues, hard bop restrengthened them, making the connection between the two genres even more palpable. Morgan had all the power of bop predecessors such as Brown, Gillespie, and Fats Navarro, but the personal sound he gradually developed was less driven by pure technique. As fellow trumpeter Freddie Hubbard told Mr. Perchard, “I had more technique [than Morgan], but he had so much fire and natural feeling that people seemed to like him more than they liked me.”

Hard bop, and Morgan’s role in it, was the beneficiary of two trends occurring outside the parameters of jazz, one technological and the other cultural. Morgan was one of the first important jazzmen to record entirely within the era of the new long-playing record, which not only made long performances and solos the norm in jazz, but brought with it a whole new mind set, making the improviser more of a star than ever before. At the same time, in the mid and late ’50s, the blues was reasserting itself in pop music and not long after, the music of Southern black churches began having a profound effect on what listeners of all colors were dancing to.

Hard bop — a strain of which eventually evolved into what is sometimes called “soul jazz” — was much funkier and more Gospel-oriented than the earlier bebop. That’s why Morgan was the perfect player for the new genre: Though he could play the clean, articulated style of the late ’40s, he also embellished his tone with special effects like growls, smears, and partial-valve effects inspired by the trumpeters of the ’20s, before bop and even swing. Morgan cultivated a more vocalized tone, like a human voice praying or singing the blues. He used the long-solo format to build intensity like a preacher, getting more ecstatic with every chorus.

Born in 1938, Morgan began playing trumpet in his native Philadelphia at about the age of 12; less than four years later he was a featured player in hero Dizzy Gillespie’s Orchestra and recording as both a leader and sideman for Blue Note and other labels. Along with Mr. Golson and Timmons, Morgan helped ignite the flagship hard bop band, the Jazz Messengers, under the dynamic leadership of Art Blakey, whose drumming both inspired the horn soloists and helped shape their efforts.

Unfortunately, Morgan shared the bad habits of most of the band’s members, including its leader, and had developed an addiction to heroin by his early 20s. The young trumpeter eventually had to retreat back to Philadelphia for most of two years, too strung out to play. When he returned to New York in 1963, he was still addicted, but at least had his problem under control enough to go back to work.

At his first Blue Note date in three years, Morgan emerged from the bathroom with a hastily conceived composition called “The Sidewinder,” which, Mr. Perchard muses, may have been partly inspired by the snakes who ran the music business. To everyone’s surprise,”The Sidewinder” turned out to be that great rarity, like “Take Five” and “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” a jazz instrumental that becomes a jukebox and radio hit. It was a funky, danceable riff that provided a shot in the arm for Morgan’s career and Blue Note Records.

For better or worse, the label encouraged Morgan to turn out a series of sidewindery sequels, like “The Rumproller” and “The Procrastinator,” all based on funky vamps and boogaloo rhythms. None of these had the inspiration and freshness of the original, but Morgan continued to make valid and interesting music, occasionally nodding in the direction of modal and free jazz, and, at the very end of his life, electrified instruments. During the late 1960s, Morgan was living with an older woman named Helen Moore, who was helping him suppress his addiction and get his career back on track. That is, before she shot him with his own pistol.

Mr. Perchard’s biography, subtitled “His life, Music, and Culture,” is excellent in the first two aspects, combining fresh interviews with Morgan’s family and fellow musicians with as much information as can be gleaned from the jazz press. He is also especially good on Morgan’s music, analytical but not so technical as to lose most readers. Mr. Perchard tends to digress about the larger cultural forces impacting Morgan’s music and misses the mark with an ill-advised firstperson intrusion, but eventually he brings his subject back into focus.

The new DVD of Morgan with the Jazz Messengers is a similar revelation: One can listen to Morgan’s early sessions with Blakey and on his own and read that he was only 20, but until one actually sees this incredibly young man playing this most profound music, it is difficult to believe. At times, Morgan betrays his inexperience by repeatedly quoting the same classic licks, but his playing is never short of remarkable.

Mr. Perchard does not make the mistake of speculating what Morgan would have done had he never met Moore. Sadly, it’s likely he would have succumbed to his addictions at an early age. Still, had he lived on, the trumpeter would only be 68 today. With a talent like Lee Morgan’s, the directions he might have gone in the last 35 years are anyone’s guess.

wfriedwald@nysun.com