I Called Him Morgan movie review (2017)

The linchpin of this movie is not Morgan himself; it’s not even Helen More, the woman who shot Morgan at the now-legendary jazz saloon Slugs on a snowy night in February 1972. Rather, it’s a cassette recording of an interview with More conducted by Larry Reni Thomas, an adult educator who met More in North Carolina, her home state, in the early 1990s, and helped More get a high school equivalency. “She wasn’t academically distinguished, but she was definitely street smart,” Thomas recalls. When More found out that Thomas was a jazz enthusiast, Lee Morgan’s name was mentioned. “I knew the story,” Thomas says. More told him that she was the surviving component of the story, and offered to tell her side to Thomas. The cassette, full of feedback, revealing More’s voice as slurry, sharp, tinged with regret, sometimes fond, and more, serves as the only narration in the movie. The rest is taken up with interviews and archival footage.

The most affecting interviewees are jazz greats Wayne Shorter and Albert “Tootie” Heath. Saxophonist Shorter came up with Morgan in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and Wayne speaks of Lee with a warmth and immediacy that one associates with a best friend. Near the end of the movie, Shorter, now 83, talks of how often he thinks of Morgan, and how often he says to people even now, “You should have known Lee Morgan.” In the archival clips and the generous snippets of music in the film, you are given some idea why: Morgan played with a remarkably clean tone (like so many of his peers, he was deeply influenced by the virtuosic Clifford Brown, whose death in 1956 at age 25 in an auto accident robbed jazz of a true great) and quicksilver energy. His playing had heat and humor. He had taken to bandstands before he was even 18. And like too many of his peers, he succumbed to substances and sensations of all sorts—Albert Heath recalls speeding in cars through Central Park’s roads in the wee small hours of a New York morning—and got a bad heroin habit. “What are you doing, Lee?” Shorter recalls thinking, while looking at a picture of Morgan from 1960 in which the trumpeter has a huge bandage wrapped around his head. Lee had shot up and dozed off—resting his head on a working radiator. The burn was such that he combed his hair forward the rest of his life to cover it up. Morgan’s addiction made him so unreliable that Blakey fired him from the Messengers along with pianist Bobby Timmons. (Timmons, whose soul-jazz tunes such as “Moanin’” achieved mainstream success not unlike that of “The Sidewinder,” died two years after Morgan, of cirrhosis.)

It was Helen More, several years Morgan’s senior, who discovered him at his most down and out, picked him up, formed a partnership with him, and helped him get healthy and productive again. “I called him Morgan,” she says on the tape, because she didn’t like the name “Lee.” More puts across a strong personality. A woman in an often very pig-headed man’s world, she brooked no disrespect. “Nasty, nasty,” she says of Miles Davis, recalling their one and only meeting, at which they both resolved to have absolutely nothing to do with each other after an exchange of maybe a couple of minutes. At some point, Morgan—who, one interviewee says, had been so physically damaged by drug use that he couldn’t have lived up to the title of “The Gigolo” even had he wanted to—grew emotionally attached to a different woman. Which did not sit well with Helen, who went one night in February to Slug’s with a gun in her purse.

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