{"id":109518,"date":"2017-04-03T13:50:13","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T17:50:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109518"},"modified":"2017-04-03T15:23:20","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T19:23:20","slug":"search-for-the-new-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/03\/search-for-the-new-land\/","title":{"rendered":"Search for the New Land"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Kasper Collin\u2019s new documentary celebrates the vibrant, turbulent life of the jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan.<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_109521\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc3.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-109521\" class=\"wp-image-109521\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc3.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"563\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc3.jpg 1600w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc3-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc3-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc3-1024x576.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-109521\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo: Kasper Collin Produktion AB. Courtesy of the Afro-American Newspaper Archives and Research Center.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEvery listener to jazz has had a few experiences so startling that they are literally unforgettable,\u201d Nat Hentoff wrote in 1960:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One of mine took place during an engagement the Dizzy Gillespie big band had at Birdland in 1957. My back was to the bandstand as the band started playing\u00a0\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/m.youtube.com\/watch?v=h1c4y8bZfs0\" target=\"_blank\">Night in Tunisia<\/a>.\u201d Suddenly, a trumpet soared out of the band into a break that was so vividly brilliant and electrifying that all conversation in the room stopped and those of us who were gesturing were frozen with hands outstretched. After the first thunderclap impact, I turned and saw that the trumpeter was the very young sideman from Philadelphia, Lee Morgan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Lee Morgan, who was nineteen\u00a0when Hentoff heard him, had this effect on many people. His sound was bright, brash,\u00a0and sassy: like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jazzonthetube.com\/videos\/james-brown\/the-sidewinder.html\" target=\"_blank\">James Brown\u2019s early work<\/a>, it had the seductively strutting arrogance of youth. Morgan was a funky, down-home player, with a penchant for \u201csmeared,\u201d dirty notes, but he was also a subtle and calculating musical thinker who constructed his solos as if they were stories. That synergy of soulfulness and hipster cool defined the so-called Blue\u00a0Note sound in the fifties and sixties, and Morgan was one of the label\u2019s most celebrated artists. As David H. Rosenthal wrote in his classic study\u00a0<em>Hard Bop<\/em>, he was the \u201cquintessential hard-bopper.\u201d\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It was a short life. Morgan succumbed to heroin in his late teens, and though the needle didn\u2019t kill him, the woman who saved him from it did. Helen Moore,\u00a0a jazz fan from rural North Carolina twelve years his senior, picked him up off the streets in the midsixties, when he\u2019d pawned almost everything he had. She\u00a0became his common-law wife, and they moved to a big apartment in the Bronx, where she kept an immaculate house, cooked for him,\u00a0and nursed him to recovery. Morgan thanked her by taking up with a younger woman. On a snowy night in February, 1972, Helen Morgan went downtown to Slug\u2019s, a club on East Third\u00a0Street where her husband was playing, and shot him dead with a gun that he had given her to protect herself.<\/p>\n<p>This made\u00a0Lee Morgan the third in a series of great postwar jazz trumpeters cut down in their prime. Clifford Brown died in a car accident in 1956, at twenty-five; Booker Little,\u00a0just a few months older than Morgan, died of kidney failure in 1961, at twenty-three. (The legendary ragtime trumpeter Buddy Bolden fell prey to psychosis at thirty, and died in a Louisiana mental ward twenty-three years later, having never recorded a single note.) But Morgan\u2019s story\u2014perhaps because of the lurid, tabloid circumstances of his death\u2014has never, until Kasper Collin\u2019s extraordinary film\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt4170344\/\"><em>I Called Him Morgan<\/em><\/a>, been accorded the same tragic dimensions.<\/p>\n<p>Collin is a Swedish documentary filmmaker who has invented a new genre: the jazz mystery. In his 2006 film,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0963778\/?ref_=nv_sr_1\" target=\"_blank\"><em>My Name Is Albert Ayler<\/em><\/a>, he investigated the life and death of the free jazz tenor saxophonist, whose honking, ecstatic playing evoked some ancient folk music, if not the birth pangs of the universe. Ayler cultivated mystical airs, ultimately declaring himself a prophet and his music a healing force; he disappeared in November 1970, and\u00a0three weeks later, his body was discovered in the East River. The cause of death\u2014a suicide, most likely\u2014was never determined. Collin made shrewd use of this mystery to explore Ayler\u2019s relationships with his brother Don, a trumpeter whose bipolar condition created delusions of grandeur, and his girlfriend, the singer Mary Parks, who refused to appear on camera, preferring, she explained, to remain an enigma.<\/p>\n<p>Lee Morgan cuts a radically different profile from Ayler: he was a straight-ahead jazz musician with an ebullient sense of humor and a taste for fast cars, expensive clothes,\u00a0and beautiful women. (One of his nicknames was \u201cHowdy,\u201d because his big ears and goofy smile made him look like Howdy Doody.) Music was his ticket out of North Philadelphia, a poor though culturally rich neighborhood where, in his teens, he led a band with the pianist Bobby Timmons. Soon he was dazzling audiences in Gillespie\u2019s orchestra. \u201cIt was fun to watch him almost challenge Dizzy,\u201d Paul West, a bassist who played with him in the orchestra, remembers. \u201cHe was extremely confident, almost to the point of being cocky.\u201d Art Blakey, the drummer who led the great hard-bop ensemble the Messengers, hired Morgan away a year later. The saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, who played opposite him, remembers in Collin\u2019s film that Blakey would shout at Morgan when he soloed: \u201cTalk to the people, tell them your story!\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-109520\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc1.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"563\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc1.jpg 1600w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc1-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc1-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc1-1024x576.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>From the late fifties until the midsixties,\u00a0Morgan was \u201cjust about the baddest thing going,\u201d Rosenthal writes in\u00a0<em>Hard Bop<\/em>, because, even at his most exuberant, he conveyed an undertone of \u201cmalice,\u201d something tougher, darker, and sexier than Clifford Brown had brought to his horn. At eighteen, he landed a contract with Blue Note, and\u00a0four years later\u00a0he recorded his biggest hit, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/m.youtube.com\/watch?v=qJi03NqXfk8\" target=\"_blank\">The Sidewinder<\/a>,\u201d a ten-minute blues with a contagious R&amp;B beat that, he said, came to him \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/m.youtube.com\/watch?v=JMtvXd6TKUw\" target=\"_blank\">like a gift from God<\/a>.\u201d He scribbled it on toilet paper in the bathroom at the sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder\u2019s studio in Englewood, New Jersey, after running out of material for the session.<\/p>\n<p>Collin doesn\u2019t tell this story; in fact, we never even hear \u201cThe Sidewinder,\u201d so intent is he on dodging the usual jazz history clich\u00e9s. But his film leaves no doubt as to why Morgan\u2019s bandmates might have been alarmed by his extended absence in the bathroom: he had just gotten out of rehab, and they suspected he might be using again. It was Blakey, who paid some of his Messengers in drugs so that he could keep more of the cash from gigs for himself, who\u2019d turned Morgan onto heroin, but Blakey could manage his habit; Morgan could not. In his 1963 book,\u00a0<em>Blues People<\/em>, LeRoi Jones suggested that heroin was popular with black jazz musicians because it \u201ctransforms the Negro\u2019s normal separation from the mainstream of society into an advantage (which, I have been saying, it is anyway). It is one-upmanship of the highest order.\u201d That one-upmanship came at an exorbitant cost. Shortly after \u201cThe Sidewinder\u201d was released, Morgan had blown all his money on heroin. When Helen first saw him on a cold winter day in 1965, he had pawned his only coat to buy drugs, and his teeth had been knocked out. The reedman and composer Bennie Maupin, who played in one of Morgan\u2019s last bands, says he \u201chad gone down as far as you can go.\u201d Although he eventually succeeded in quitting heroin, he never entirely stopped taking drugs\u2014something Collin does not mention\u2014and began to snort coke as a substitute.<\/p>\n<p>There is nothing mysterious about the death of Lee Morgan, unlike Albert Ayler\u2019s: Helen was in a crowd of onlookers when she killed him. But\u00a0<em>I Called Him Morgan<\/em>\u00a0illuminates a deeper, in some ways more intriguing mystery: the jazz life of the hard-bop era, which saw a confluence with civil rights and Black Power. What interests Collin is not so much recording or performance as the intimacy among musicians and their friends. This is a world we know mostly from the work of photographers like Roy deCarava, Lee Friedlander, and W. Eugene Smith, who spent time with jazz musicians when they weren\u2019t performing, and captured their intimate lives off-stage. Collin\u2019s cameraman, the gifted cinematographer Bradford Young (<em>Selma<\/em>,<em> Mother of George<\/em>,<em>\u00a0<\/em><em>A Most Violent Year<\/em>), has clearly studied their work. Snow falling and city lights in New York; seagulls, trees,\u00a0and sunset in North Carolina: Young shoots these recurring images in elusive, grainy textures that give the film a moody atmosphere reminiscent of the French New Wave, a movement\u00a0intoxicated by the sounds of sixties jazz.<\/p>\n<p>What Collin is after, I think, is something just as elusive as Young\u2019s imagery: the relationship between creation and (self-) destruction. It\u2019s well known that the world of jazz musicians was bedeviled by poverty, drugs, racism, police violence, and\u2014a cure that could end up feeling like a curse\u2014self-imposed exile. What held that world together and made artistic innovation possible is less well understood. As<em>\u00a0<\/em><em>I Called Him Morgan<\/em>\u00a0reminds us, friendship was one of its pillars: we hear musicians remembering their times with Lee, and what they remember isn\u2019t only music, but eating, buying clothes, and racing cars at\u00a0midnight\u00a0in Central Park. They were hardly unscathed by competition, but this was partly offset by a common artistic purpose, and by the hopes inspired by the civil rights struggle, which Morgan evoked in his epic 1964 composition \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/m.youtube.com\/watch?v=YDfkkRa1VA8\" target=\"_blank\">Search for the New Land<\/a>\u201d\u2014a piece that provides Collin with his leitmotif. Jazz musicians were trying to create not only a new music, but another country, to borrow the title of James Baldwin\u2019s 1962 novel, which turns on the suicide of a jazz drummer named Rufus Scott.<\/p>\n<p>They could not have done so\u2014they could scarcely have survived\u2014without fellow travelers\u00a0in bohemia who shared their vision and kept them going in the most inauspicious conditions. Some were artists, like the painter Bob Thompson, a friend of Ornette Coleman and Jackie McLean; some were critics, like Hentoff, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka),\u00a0and A. B. Spellman; still others were producers who didn\u2019t steal from them, like Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff at Blue Note, German Jewish exiles who championed jazz as a uniquely African American expression of modernism\u2014\u201cthe animal brothers, the Lion and the Wolf,\u201d as Shorter fondly remembers them.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_109522\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc4.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-109522\" class=\"wp-image-109522\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc4.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"563\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc4.jpg 1600w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc4-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc4-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/morgandoc4-1024x576.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-109522\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo: Kasper Collin Produktion AB \/ Francis Wolff \u00a9 Mosaic Images LLC.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>But the most crucial members of the scene, besides the musicians, may have been the women, most of whom have been lost to history. Spellman began his 1966 book\u00a0<em>Four Lives in the Bebop Business<\/em>\u00a0by paying tribute to Jeanne Phillips, \u201ca committed woman whose opinions are valued and whose barbs are feared by those musicians and critics who know her \u2026 She exemplifies perfectly that growing group of new jazz loyalists who feel, with reason, that history has deposited the vital culture of these times in their corner.\u201d It is no wonder\u00a0that two of the finest memoirs of this milieu\u2014Hettie Jones\u2019s\u00a0<em>How I Became Hettie Jones<\/em>, by LeRoi Jones\u2019s first wife, and Sue Mingus\u2019s\u00a0<em>Tonight at\u00a0Noon<\/em>, by Charles Mingus\u2019s widow\u2014are by women, who saw the beautiful struggle of their partners from the inside.<\/p>\n<p>Helen Morgan was one of these women. Long before she became a murderer, she was a country-girl bohemian, a regular at uptown jam sessions who attracted attention for her provocative, form-fitting outfits, her streetwise attitude,\u00a0and her salty tongue. She would cook fine meals at her apartment, known as \u201cHelen\u2019s place,\u201d a salon where musicians and her friends\u2014many of them gay and lesbian\u2014would gather in the small hours. She did not use drugs\u2014her nickname was the \u201clittle hip square\u201d\u2014but she didn\u2019t judge those who did, and she would often put up addicts who needed a place to sleep.<\/p>\n<p>One of the great strengths of Collin\u2019s film is that it honors her work and struggle as a black woman from the South:\u00a0<em>I Called Him Morgan<\/em>\u00a0is as much about Helen Morgan as it is about Lee. What could have been a judgmental film about a scorned woman who kills her lover in a jealous rage is, instead, a sorrowful, almost redemptive study of contrition and forgiveness. We hear Helen\u2019s voice throughout the film in a slightly hissing tape made by Larry Reni Thomas, an adult educator in Wilmington, North Carolina, who taught her after she was released from prison. Thomas recorded the interview in February 1996; Helen died a month later. Warbling and grainy, coquettish yet strong, somewhat reminiscent of Billie Holiday, her voice carries us through the film, along with Morgan\u2019s \u201cSearch for the New Land.\u201d She, too, was looking for another country when she left the Jim Crow South for New York, in her late teens, just as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were launching the bebop revolution at uptown clubs like Minton\u2019s, and on \u201cThe Street\u201d\u2014West Fifty-Second Street.<\/p>\n<p>She was born in a small town in North Carolina, and her ambition was to get out. She had her first child at thirteen, her second at fourteen: \u201cthat disillusioned me from a whole lot of things.\u201d She left her children in the care of her grandparents and moved to Wilmington at seventeen. There she met a thirty-nine-year-old bootlegger, whom she married a week later. After he \u201cgot drowned\u201d\u2014one of her sons would later claim she stabbed him to death\u2014she went to New York, where she lived on West Fifty-Third, a block from \u201cThe Street\u201d; though Collin makes no mention of it,\u00a0she reportedly made a living delivering packages for a Harlem drug dealer who trusted her because she wasn\u2019t a user. Ron Saint Clair, one of her neighbors, says she was \u201ca hero in the neighborhood because she had come up from the South and she had to struggle because she didn\u2019t want to work for anyone.\u201d She was a survivor who knew how to defend herself. \u201cI won&#8217;t pretend I was nice,\u201d she told Thomas. \u201cI wasn\u2019t. I was sharp. I had to be. And I looked out for me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She also looked out for others, particularly addicts and unstable people, and one of them was Lee Morgan. \u201cChild, you need your coat,\u201d were her first words to him, and she immediately took him in.\u00a0Collin does not speculate on her motivations\u2014like his film on Ayler,<em>\u00a0<\/em><em>I Called Him Morgan<\/em>\u00a0is told solely through interviews and newsreel footage, without voice-over\u2014but one wonders if she was looking to replace the children she had abandoned down South. (Al Harrison, one of her sons, says he did not meet her until he was twenty-one and came to visit her in New York.) She was, in Maupin\u2019s words, \u201chis confidante, his friend, his lover \u2026 She had a real quiet strength about her, and he really trusted her.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/lee-morgan-sidewinder.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-109519\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/lee-morgan-sidewinder.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"985\" height=\"985\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/lee-morgan-sidewinder.jpeg 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/lee-morgan-sidewinder-150x150.jpeg 150w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/lee-morgan-sidewinder-300x300.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/lee-morgan-sidewinder-768x768.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>He had every reason to. As Paul West, a bassist who played with Morgan in the Gillespie orchestra, says, \u201cThis is the woman who took him literally from the gutter and made it possible for him to function as an artist.\u201d West helped keep Morgan off the streets by recruiting him for a music-education program that he was running, the Jazz Mobile Workshop, where young people in the black community were taught by its leading artists. In Collin\u2019s film, we see Morgan with a group of four young trumpet players, performing under a poster that reads, <small>DRUGS THE HORROR TRAP<\/small>, with an image of an arm being injected with heroin. Morgan was still a young man, barely in his thirties, but to his students, who had never heard of Clifford Brown, he was \u201cancient,\u201d and, as a black artist, he felt a growing sense of responsibility to his community. He no longer used the word <em>jazz<\/em> to describe his music\u2014\u201cit\u2019s a word that we were told what it was, like we were told we are Negroes,\u201d he said. He became active in the Jazz and People\u2019s Movement, a coalition of musicians who fought against abuses by the record industry; according to the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, a member of the band that played at Slug\u2019s on the night of his murder, he had become a convert to Malcolm X\u2019s philosophy of black economic and political self-determination.<\/p>\n<p>His music changed,\u00a0too, soaking up the modal structures that Coltrane had popularized in his classic quartet, and the funky rhythms of the new R&amp;B. The sly, sardonic sensibility of \u201cThe Sidewinder\u201d gave way to the spiritual yearning of Afro-soul jazz, a movement that he helped pioneer, and which has become fashionable again thanks to musicians like the LA tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington. In one of the most striking clips in Collin\u2019s film\u2014an important corrective to the myth that jazz had lost a popular black audience by the end of the 1960s\u2014Morgan can be seen performing in a 1971 episode of the program\u00a0<em>Soul<\/em>, in a room packed with hip young black people wearing naturals. They played a piece written for Morgan by his bassist Jymie Merritt, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/m.youtube.com\/watch?v=v2A16UUbqvo\" target=\"_blank\">Angela<\/a>,\u201d dedicated to \u201cSister Angela Davis,\u201d then in a California State prison. Morgan, the fast-living bon viveur, had kicked his habit and gotten religion.<\/p>\n<p>He had also found a mistress, Judith Johnson, a contemporary he&#8217;d known socially for some years. They didn&#8217;t have much of a sex life\u2014his sexuality, she says, was \u201calmost nonexistent because of what he had been through\u201d\u2014but she loved music as much as he did, and the connection ran so deep that he began spending much of his time at her place in New Jersey. On the night of the murder, Johnson drove him to the Bronx so he could pick up his horn. He had a weeklong gig at Slug\u2019s, a club on East Third\u00a0between B and C, a long, narrow saloon with sawdust on the floor that, as Billy Harper says, \u201chad the reputation of being the place where you could hear the real cats.\u201d It had already snowed four or five inches, and she totaled her car near the Grand Concourse. Morgan was shaken since he knew that it could have been much worse: he mentioned Clifford Brown\u2019s death in a car crash, when they arrived, at last, at Slug\u2019s. Then \u201cthe doors just flung open and there was Helen,\u201d Billy Harper recalls. \u201cShe said, \u2018I\u2019m here for the draw.\u2019 \u201d Morgan threw her out, without her coat; her gun fell out of the bag. She picked it up\u00a0and walked back in. After she shot him, she said to herself it had to be a dream. He died before the ambulance arrived.<\/p>\n<p>Lee\u2019s friends were shocked; most of them never saw Helen again. \u201cIt was a sad time, the end of a beginning,\u201d Jymie Merritt says. She pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and served two years. Not long after her release on probation, the bassist Larry Ridley, who played on Morgan\u2019s 1967 album <em>Cornbread<\/em>, spotted her at a club called the Needle\u2019s Eye. He had told himself that if he ever saw her, he would \u201cgive her a piece of my mind.\u201d Instead, he found himself opening his arms and embracing her. \u201cThe anger just went away.\u201d She was Helen Morgan, after all, and without her, he knew that Lee would never have had a second act. In 1975, her son drove her back down to North Carolina, where she settled in Wilmington and became deeply involved in her church. She was not a believer, but, as her son explains, \u201cshe wanted to repent, to give back.\u201d Back in the old country, she at last \u201cfound her salvation,\u201d the peace and serenity that had eluded her, and the man she had loved, in their search for the new land.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the\u00a0<\/em>London Review of Books<em>\u00a0and a fellow in residence at the New York Institute for the Humanities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lee Morgan was a renowned jazz trumpeter; his wife murdered him when he was only thirty-three. \u201cI Called Him Morgan\u201d takes a new look at his life and times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1098,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1186],"tags":[28178,28183,28179,12512,8444,1665,28176,28170,28174,4040,6235,28169,28172,6239,13797,862,8705,28180,28168,28171,15252,28181,28186,881,1868,330,28164,28165,28175,28182,28184,10728,12079,12513,657,81,1826,28173,28162,125,694,28177,28185,28167,28166,1550,28163],"class_list":["post-109518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-film","tag-a-b-spellman","tag-al-harrison","tag-alfred-lion","tag-amiri-baraka","tag-art-blakey","tag-blue-note","tag-bobby-timmons","tag-booker-little","tag-buddy-bolden","tag-charles-mingus","tag-charlie-parker","tag-clifford-brown","tag-david-h-rosenthal","tag-dizzy-gillespie","tag-documentaries","tag-drugs","tag-films","tag-francis-wolff","tag-hard-bop","tag-helen-moore","tag-heroin","tag-hettie-jones","tag-i-called-him-morgan","tag-james-baldwin","tag-james-brown","tag-jazz","tag-jazz-music","tag-jazz-musicians","tag-kasper-collin","tag-larry-reni-thomas","tag-larry-ridley","tag-lee-friedlander","tag-lee-morgan","tag-leroi-jones","tag-marriage","tag-movies","tag-murder","tag-my-name-is-albert-ayler","tag-nat-hentoff","tag-new-york-city","tag-philadelphia","tag-roy-de-carava","tag-rudy-van-gelder","tag-the-sidewinder","tag-trumpeters","tag-w-eugene-smith","tag-wayne-shorter"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>A New Documentary Explores a Lee Morgan\u2019s Short, Vibrant Life in Music<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Lee Morgan was a renowned jazz trumpeter; 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