Music first caught Morgan when he was a child. It’s not, ‘Oh, I’ll go into the studios and give up.’ You’re faced with new challenges every day in there.” But the studio has some of the greatest players in the world, on the cutting edge of their instruments. “That image may be true in some sections where people sit in the back row and just saw their way through life. In the world of self-contained rock bands, session players are sometimes referred to disparagingly as “studio hacks,” to which Morgan replies, “Wrong.”
All the first-chair players are old friends of mine.” So many members of the Pacific Symphony also work in the Los Angeles studios that for Morgan, a performance with the orchestra “is like old home week for me. “After doing that I decided to work up a package of pops material, because I realized on stage there that I’d certainly rather perform with a very good orchestra than with a semi-inebriated Italian band on a boat,” he said. A performance with the Pacific Symphony in a pops concert last March made him decide otherwise. He had considered filling his urge for live performance by playing on cruise ships, since he also wanted to travel. But you miss the peaks of a live performance, and the experience of having an audience.” “I have hidden out in recording studios for a lot of years and am only now re-entering the world of live performances,” he said. Morgan expects he’ll enjoy the performance at least as much as he hopes the kids will.
His material ranges from music from the 1963 Sidney Poitier film “Lilies of the Field” to the identifying motif for Arnold the Pig from “Green Acres.” For the flashy “El Cumbanchero,” Morgan will make 11 instrument changes over the course of two minutes. In the “Harmonicas!” segment, he’ll introduce listeners to the various members of the harmonica family-from a one-inch piccolo model to the two-foot-long chord harmonica. That and his two other featured numbers, David Guion’s “The Harmonica Player” and Hernandez’s “El Cumbanchero,” were picked to give kids a memorable display of the sound and capabilities of the instrument.