It must have been something in the water, or 'just one of those crazy things.' American jazz trumpeters back in the day seemed to die tragically young. Yes, the three most influential – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis – managed an early old age, while the splendid Kenny Dorham, Blue Mitchell and Woody Shaw just about reached their middle years before ill health finished them off; but the list of greats or potential greats who never even saw middle age seems too long to be coincidental: Booker Little, terminated by uraemia at 23; Clifford Brown, golden 'Brownie', killed in a car accident at 25; Fats Navarro, carried off by a combination of hard drugs and ill health at 26; Freddie Webster, struck down by a heart attack at 31; Lee Morgan, shot by his common-law wife at Slugs, where he and his quintet were performing. There were others – Bix Beiderbecke and Bunny Berigan for two – but I hope not too many.
In some ways, Morgan's death was the most tragic. Not because he was the greatest trumpeter of the bunch – many who knew him seemed to think that Clifford Brown could have been the greatest of all – but because he was certainly the most prolific. Emcee John Robinson reels off the names of some of the many albums that Morgan recorded for Blue Note during the 1960s and early '70s in the reverential track 'The Lee Morgan Story' on bass player Ben Williams' album, State Of Art. So there's an element of 'young man gunned down in his prime' about his story. The fact that it was his wife who shot him might suggests that perhaps he had it coming to him, but no one seemed to have a bad word to say about the trumpeter, and the fascinating 2016 documentary, I Called Him Morgan, offers an in-depth study of his relationship with Helen Morgan, his troubled wife, that defies stereotypes and intensifies the tragedy. Jymie Merritt, Morgan's former colleague in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and his bassist at the time of the slaying, said 'I just couldn't believe it. I didn't know what to think, because they were always together.' Helen Morgan herself, whose tape recording just before her own death was the catalyst for the film, was heard to say 'I couldn't have did this; this must be a dream.'
Shades, perhaps, of another prolific artist, Joe Orton, who also died needlessly at the hands of a deranged lover. Further underscoring the needless aspect of the tragedy is the fact that the shooting coincided with one of the worst New York snowfalls of that era, which prevented an ambulance from reaching the trumpeter in time. Effectively, his wife fatally wounded him, and Lee Morgan slowly bled to death.
The trumpeter from Philadelphia with the trademark slicked-down hairstyle and the crisp, ringing timbre inspired a certain reverence. Quite apart from Ben Williams' 'The Lee Morgan Story', there's a short video in which his regular pianist Harold Mabern tells poignantly of how he witnessed Morgan's assassination, and how deeply the death of his friend and employer affected him. And I shall be forever grateful to a musician in Sheffield, a big fan of Lee Morgan, who relieved us of a very troublesome French live-in tenant (not, I hasten to add, by any such drastic means as murder, but by giving him a room in his own house).
The reverence derives not just from his instrumental technique and mastery, but surely from the man's driven, restless creativity. A bit of a child star on his instrument, he joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band at age 18 for two years and thence Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for three, as a key component of two of the unit's most celebrated combinations: with Wayne Shorter, pianist Bobby Timmons and bass player, Jymie Merritt; and then in an expanded sextet format with Curtis Fuller on trombone. At 'n-n-n-nineteen', he and Fuller were young guns together on John Coltrane's landmark Blue Train, my introduction to a subsequent hero. With a foot now in the Blue Note camp, he made countless solo albums for the label, as well as even more on which he was enlisted as lead trumpet.
Quintessential-lee – and he was given to using his first name for a raft of bad puns as titles – he was a post-bop trumpeter, usually appearing in a quintet setting playing a standard format of statement of theme, individual solos and re-statement of theme. But he was young and questing. Arguably, his finest album as leader bears the symbolic title Search For The New Land. It came just after he found brief popular fame as the darling of soul jazz when his funky, sinuous 'The Sidewinder' – composed off the cuff at the end of a recording session, again according to his fellow Philadelphian, Jymie Merritt – became a surprise smash. The first Lee Morgan in still-fairly-new-fangled CD form I found was the epic three-disc Live At The Lighthouse set – in an excellent second-hand record shop on Jersey, staffed by the most supercilious bunch I ever had the misfortune to encounter. Made in 1970, it shows clearly that the trumpeter was already breaking free of the post-bop chains that had bound him (very successfully, however) for over a decade.
That's mainly why I chose this particular performance. It's essentially the same group as the Lighthouse unit Рbut with another alumnus of the Jazz Messengers, Billy Harper, standing in for Bennie Maupin, who had gone off to seek fame and fortune as one of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters; and Freddy Waits instead of Mickey Roker on drums. It's two years on and it's now 'Brother Lee Morgan and the quintet' and poignantly it's less than a month before the fatal shooting. 'I Remember Britt' was written by pianist Harold Mabern (I thought at first that it might be some elegiac reference to Duke Ellington's trombonist, Britt Woodman, but he didn't die until the year 2000) and was also part of the Lighthouse repertoire. It's a lovely piece: unusually, it features Billy Harper on flute, and very unusually starts with a variation on 'Fr̬re Jacques'. Morgan plays the mellower flugelhorn and stands back to let Billy Harper take the first solo. When Lee takes his solo next, I love the little, almost subliminal quote from 'Three Blind Mice' right at the beginning. Probably because he's on flugelhorn, you could shut your eyes and imagine that it's Hugh Masekela playing. It's then the turn of Harold Mabern, who reels off a lovely, lyrical and understated solo. We then get the restatement of theme, but it feels much more like composition than formula. It's nice to see a predominantly black audience for once and the loud fashions and Afro hairstyles on display are an added bonus. You can leave it there at 9 minutes 30 seconds, or stay on for Jymie Merritt's homage to Angela Davis, 'Angela', which appears on Lee Morgan's final, eponymous album.
When it comes to individual numbers, there's not a whole lot of choice on YouTube, but what's on offer is precious. Among those I checked out is a real curiosity: Lee Morgan playing the Bobby Timmons classic, 'Moanin'', a staple of the Messengers for many years, in the exalted company of the Oscar Peterson trio. There's nothing at all wrong with it, each individual plays his part well, but it just doesn't seem quite... right. Despite 'Night Train', Oscar Peterson doesn't seem built for this kind of jazz. A genuine contender was 'Theme For Stacey' from 1965, featuring a very short-lived version of the Jazz Messengers that numbered Lee Morgan with Sun Ra's trusty cohort, John Gilmore, on tenor sax and John Hicks on piano, long before he hitched up with Pharoah Sanders. It's one of several from the BBC's late-lamented Jazz 625 series.
If you scroll through the comments to this last one, indeed any of the videos that feature him, you'll appreciate how many people still revere Lee Morgan. I'm not sure, though, that I agree with Clowd Walker, who suggests that 'Lee Morgan played the trumpet the way Miles Davis wished he could have played.' I dare say that Lee would have envied Miles his longer life and his artistic immortality. Anyway, to quote RealBro: 'Lee Morgan, simply Brilliant!'
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