With the best jazz recordings you recognise the beginning and know where it’s going to wind up, but it’s the road there that’s unpredictable. To that end, Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Morgan isn’t just the greatest jazz documentary since Let’s Get Lost, it’s a documentary-as-jazz. Spellbinding, mercurial, hallucinatory, exuberant, tragic … aw hell, man, those are a lot of heavy words, but have you heard Lee Morgan’s music? More importantly, do you know the story of his life?
Lee Morgan may have been one of the most important trumpet players in jazz, but he doesn’t have the household name status of Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis. Unfortunately, like Bix Beiderbecke and Clifford Brown, he died way too young. While Morgan’s output as the leader of his own working group is outstanding (may I recommend to you The Sidewinder, The Gigolo or perhaps even The Rumproller) he was also a linchpin member of the classic Blue Note sound overseen by producers Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff and engineer Rudy Van Gelder.
That’s Lee beside John Coltrane on the legendary 1957 album Blue Train. And that’s Lee as part of the Jazz Messengers, the supergroup led by drummer Art Blakey that ostensibly invented the subgenre known as hard bop. For those who don’t know much about jazz, this sound is what you think about when you think about jazz. And it’s Lee Morgan blowing the horn. And it’s Lee Morgan’s squeak at the 0:59 mark of Moanin’ that gives this art form its ineffable quality.
But I Called Him Morgan is far from a traditional documentary. Its story-within-a-story begins with a 2013 interview with Larry Reni Thomas, a North Carolina teacher who just so happens to be a legendary jazz DJ. In the mid 1990s, as he was greeting new students in an adult education class, he realised his new pupil (nearing age 70) was Helen Morgan, Lee’s widow. In 1996 Thomas sat down with an inexpensive tape recorder and asked her questions. A month later she died.
Collin turns to that plain, unlabelled white tape, marred by squeaks and hisses, and from it emerges the ghost of a voice. Helen Morgan was born in the 1920s in rural North Carolina, had two children out of wedlock at ages 13 and 14, then left for New York at 17 after her new husband passed away in an accident. She got a job at an answering service, and her apartment, located near all the jazz hotspots on West 53rd street, became something of a haven for musicians – mostly because she took pride in her cooking and was ready to feed anyone who came to her door.
At the same time, Lee Morgan was the young wonder on the scene. Collin traces his time with the Jazz Messengers using a deluge of remarkable photographs set to music. Commentary from Wayne Shorter, Tootie Heath, Larry Ridley and others offer insight, but not much can top the swirl of images. In 1964, Morgan recorded Search for the New Land (a precursor of sorts, I would argue, to the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme or Pharoah Sanders’s Karma) but, by that time, he had a debilitating drug addiction.
Lee and Helen finally collided in 1967. He was strung out and freezing on the street, and she brought him in from the cold. In Thomas’s audiotape, her recollection is so tender and so sad. “Why don’t you have a coat?” she repeats, in a thin, quaking voice.
Though 13 years his senior, she became his lover after being his nurse. Once he was cleaned up, they moved to the Bronx and he restarted his career, with her as his manager. But their relationship was not traditional. They were never formally married and Helen’s son, who was now back in the picture, was the same age as Lee. Though clean, one gets the impression Lee Morgan was still in a fog, and when he began a relationship with a new woman living in New Jersey, trouble began to mount.
I’m lucky to have spent many of my younger years as a jazz enthusiast in New York City and I swear to you it isn’t revisionist history that the music sounds better on snowy nights. Winter images (recreated on what appears to be 8mm) recur in I Called Him Morgan – snow outside the car window while passing the bridges surrounding Manhattan – and the film’s climax is inexorably linked to a horrible blizzard.
Though Lee and Helen Morgan’s fate is easily learned with a quick Google search, I’d rather leave it unspoken, out there in memory’s snowdrift, something strange and indescribable, like this sad but still beautiful film itself.
