TT 480: The Day Lee Morgan Died
Final bonus post connected to "Jazz Off the Record" also includes various additions from the past week
The February cover article in The Nation, “Jazz Off the Record.”
The sidebar, “In Full Swing.”
TT bonus 1, Steve Lampert and his Slugs’ handbills.
TT bonus 2, Shuja Haider, “Interstellar Bop” and “Late Jazz”
TT bonus 3, Art Blakey’s “A Night in Tunisa” and Free For All + the piano players
TT bonus 4:
The first paragraph of my latest Nation article is about the murder of Lee Morgan at Slugs’; it’s frankly an attempt to get a general reader interested in an article about jazz.
In the excellent documentary I Called Him Morgan, a phrase uttered by Lee Morgan’s girlfriend/murderer Helen —- “He bought me a gun, he said it was for my protection” — brought forth a literary memory. “A Handgun for Protection” is a bitter short story by crime author John Lutz, who is best known for the movie adaptions Single White Female and The Ex. I was so impressed with this tale when I first read it decades ago that I sought out more Lutz. In the end, this story remains the only item from that author that has stayed with me; it is collected in the Lutz anthology Until You Are Dead, only $4 on Kindle.
Helen’s comment in I Called Him Morgan chimed with Lutz’s “Protection” and begat my lede:
Sometime in the late 1960s or early ’70s, Lee Morgan bought his girlfriend Helen Moore a gun. “It’s for your protection,” he told her.
I listened to Lee Morgan growing up, but was only vaguely aware that Morgan died young until my first tour with Billy Hart in 2000, when Billy told his version of the story. A revelation! A few years later, in 2006, I got him to repeat the story on tape. On my old site Do the Math, the page was called “The Day Lee Morgan Died.” Here it is reposted again, almost 20 years later.
Errata: There are four volumes of Elvin Jones’s Skyscrapers on Honey Dew, not three. Some of it is the same as the Enja record. I love “By George” and transcribed George Coleman’s solo.
The reported James Gavin article on Slugs’ was an important source for my article. Gavin writes that Jackie McLean initiated the music policy, but apparently the truth is more complicated. The owners of the club were friends with bassist David Izenzon, who hired Paul Bley to play a one-off tryout some months before McLean’s first Slugs’ performance. Bley was supposed to find a drummer, and he asked Barry Altschul to play.
I talked briefly with Altschul a couple of days ago: Bley and Altschul met when Bley was recording the wonderful quartet music with John Gilmore, Gary Peacock, and Paul Motian. Altschul was the janitor at the studio, but Bley liked his rap, so he asked Altschul to come down to Slugs’. That was the first time Bley and Altschul played together. “The Bley gig was mine forever after that!” Altschul told me.
The saxophonist Vinny Golia (who I first heard with Tim Berne) left an interesting comment. He was a denizen of Slugs’, but the real surprise was that his (uncredited) art graces the cover of Chick Corea’s The Song of Singing with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul. The painting is an abstracted impression of the trio playing at the Village Vanguard.
Golia also did (credited) art for Joe Henderson’s Black is the Color and Dave Holland/Barre Phillips Music from Two Basses.
The saxophonist Allen Lowe (who is also an important music historian) reports that on one of the occasions he was in Slugs’, Jean Genet was there. They both listened to Charles Mingus that night.
Just one more Slugs’ story from one who has been gone for a few years: Paul Motian. I asked Motian about Ornette Coleman, and he said that he saw Ornette’s band with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell every night for a week when they were at Slugs’. Motian was generally pretty reserved, but he really lit up and became more animated than usual when talking about that Ornette gig. I think this probably would have taken place in 1971.
Motian was a late bloomer, but he always kept studying. His comment about Ornette at Slugs’ eventually found its way into my essay about Keith Jarrett’s American quartet.
Motian has been excellent so far, but in 1975 something changes, he’s now one of the greatest drummers of all time.
In the realm of total speculation: Haden and Redman may have been resistant to playing open 4/4 swing (with no preset changes) with Jarrett and Motian at first, wanting to reserve that most special space for the gigs with Ornette Coleman and Ed Blackwell. Motian told me about how impressed he was with that Coleman-Redman-Haden-Blackwell quartet when he got to see them at Slugs’. First, Motian studied Jimmy Crawford in order to swing, then he studied Max Roach and Kenny Clarke in order to play bebop, then he studied Sunny Murray in order to play free, and finally he studied Ed Blackwell in order to play free in time.
I second your recommendation of "I Called Him Morgan." It is excellent. I had a chance to catch Morgan at the Famous Ballroom before he died, but missed the concert. I don't remember why. But I did catch Olu Dara, though I forget who he was with. Also, I was at a concert by Johnny Griffin when he played Morgan's "Soulita," in which he quoted Morgan quoting Ziggy Elman (his fralach licks).
Morgan was my trumpeter. Yes, Satch, Roy, Diz, Miles, I loved them too. But Lee Morgan got me in a way no other trumpeter did. You have no idea how pleased I was when I was talking with Frank Foster, who was teaching an improvisation class at SUNY Buffalo, where I was getting a degree in English. We were talking about trumpeters and he asked, with a smile on his face, what I thought of Lee Morgan. Of course I told him. We agreed that Lee had the fire. He also had cool whole tone licks, which I picked up from him.
In my short story collection The Music Never Died (https://www.versechorus.com/the-music-never-died) Lee Morgan teams up in the afterlife with Jam Master Jay from Run-DMC.