I reviewed the new documentary on the life of jazz trumpet player and composer, Lee Morgan, in the new edition of No Recess! magazine.
I Called Him Morgan
A Film by Kasper Collin
1h 32min
Non-Americans are empirically better at appreciating our country’s cultural output than we are: Look what England, Canada, and Australia did with rock ‘n’ roll. Then there are the French, the Dutch, the Danish, and the Swiss, who have archived and appreciated jazz far better than we have. Just ask the musicians who thrived in Europe in the 20th Century, some of them making their homes away from home there.
Currently, it’s the Swedes in the lead, who are deconstructing our culture in state-of-the-art documentaries on Black lives. Göran Hugo Olsson’s The Black Power Mixtape (2011) took up connections between 50 years of Black liberation movement and hip-hop and reinvented the socio-political-music documentary. Now we have Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Morgan, concerning the life and death of composer and trumpet player Lee Morgan, shot in 1972 by his wife and manager Helen, that takes the music doc into uncharted territory.
Collin delivers a self-described “understated narrative” that sidesteps the fine points of biography and allows the musician’s compositions to speak for themselves, resulting in a whole new filmic form of redemption song.
Collin, a relative newcomer to filmmaking with one film, 2007’s My Name Is Albert Ayler, to his credit (about iconoclastic musician Albert Ayler), came to his second subject through his music that still plays in regular rotation, at least on YouTube. “It was never my intention to make another jazz film,” he told an audience at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April. Indeed, he knew of Morgan’s background sketch — super-talent, magnificent in fact, his hit “The Sidewinder,” and the crime of passion that ended it all. But when he came upon a clip of Morgan as a young man playing with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, he became spellbound by sound.
Combing the internet for information about his newfound obsession, Collin unearthed some documentation just too tempting to let pass: There existed a 27-minute recorded interview transcript with Helen, recounting the couple’s story. Told in 1996 (just a month before her death) to her teacher and jazz enthusiast in Wilmington, North Carolina, Collin made it his business to find its recordist, Larry Reni Thomas, and the cassette itself, which was degenerating by the minute in a drawer.
With this crackling piece of audio tape (restored, of course), Collin found his basic track for the film, and it became his invitation to tell two stories: One of the hardscrabble country girl who made her way to New York City; the other of a teenage musical prodigy turned dope fiend who made an incredible comeback and a lasting impression on jazz itself. Layering the audio with an unprecedented number of high-quality stills (taken by Blue Note’s Francis Wolff), moving footage of Morgan, newly rendered experimental B-roll, and important interviews with friends and bandmates like Wayne Shorter, Paul West, and Bernie Maupin, Collin’s film sails on Morgan’s melodies toward its dizzying denouement that coincides with an epic Noreaster. But it is Morgan’s horn and his own original sound over a vast Blue Note catalog that lives strong: The title piece from his 1964 recording, Search For The New Land, serves as a theme throughout the film, encapsulating in sound Morgan’s story: low down, but with hints of shimmer and brilliance shining through.
Morgan hailed from Philadelphia and joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band at age 18. He and saxophonist Wayne Shorter soon joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and began their careers in earnest, traveling the world, blowing their horns, indulging in the best of everything from cars to shoes and clothes. “Best car, best lady, best shoes,” said friend and bassist Paul West. But it wasn’t long before Morgan fell for drugs and quit playing altogether. At one point he not only sold his horn but his shoes, claiming he preferred dope to all else life had to offer. “He came to the studio in his slippers,” recalled bassist Jymie Merritt, still visibly pained by the memory of his once sharp-dressed pal sinking so low.
Enter Helen, a self-made woman from the South and fixture on the jazz scene; she lived not far from Birdland and was known to the jazz crowd for her home cooking and hospitality. Helen met Morgan (as she preferred to call him) at a house party when he was at his worst: no coat, no shoes, no teeth, and certainly no horn. Fourteen years his senior, she made it her job to get him clean. By all accounts, their life together was good — which made its end when Lee was just 33 and on the comeback trail all the more shocking to their inner circle and the jazz public. Helen’s taped explanation of what happened that night is brief and to the point, as if it could’ve happened to anyone, but its chilling vocalization is best saved for the viewer.
Like the deaths of Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, which were not entirely unexpected, and that of Clifford Brown which was, Morgan’s loss continues to be grieved by the jazz survivors who knew him well. I Called Him Morgan ensures listeners of Lee Morgan and newcomers to the sound will feel the loss too, not only for the life of an American giant and sessions never recorded, but for the gone world, when jazz defined excellence, style, and ultimately rebellion.
It’s an unusual post where I want to send you away from my site and toward another, but that’s the case this evening…As it happens, I’m back on the rock ‘n’ roll beat and want to point you to a couple of publications where my work is now playing:
Last week, a group of former colleagues launched No Recess!a music and culture site that aims to bring you some good reading on rock ‘n’ roll, resistance, and whatever else they feel like.
I’m also filing a monthly column over at Tourworthy. My first piece is on the Latino psychedelic soulsters with a message, Chicano Batman. I hope you’ll look deeper into these new publications and lend them your eyes (and ears) as they keep you up-to-date on the sounds that matter, on the music that’s making a difference. As ever, thanks for reading!
In 1969, Norman Greenbaum had a worldwide hit and US #3 with “Spirit in the Sky.” Greenbaum sold over two million copies of the single in which he claimed he had a “friend in Jesus,” never mind he was Jewish. “Spirit in the Sky” was not the first or the last time Jesus hit the charts, but its success marked the unofficial beginning of a Jesus movement in and outside of rock in the ’70s that impacted the popular arts, from Broadway to Bob Dylan.
Partly a reaction to the hippie culture and also a part of it, the Jesus people, or Jesus freaks, as they were proudly known within their movement, generally sought to return Christianity to its origins. The seeds of today’s Christian right as well as its progressive left-wing were both sown in the loosely established communities/communes, and in some cases cults, which sought to throw off religious strictures as well as its staid music. Ironically, the so-called devil’s music conservatives railed against is massively marketed today as Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), a major tool to keep young people interested in faith, though that isn’t the subject of this post. Rather, these are the songs sung by generally secular rockers who went sacred at the height of the Jesus music movement of the ’70s, a 10-year period bookended by ’69’s “Spirit in the Sky” and “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979, the last time Dylan had a high-charting single at #24).
In 1966, John Lennon joked the Beatles were bigger than Jesus and caught hell for it, though by the time he invoked Christ’s name and sang of his own crucifixion in 1969′s “The Ballad of John and Yoko”, all was forgiven and only a few outlets banned it, branding it sacrilegious. By the end of the year, the Beatles were all but said and done, and it was the Quiet One who revealed himself to be the spiritual seeker of the group. Sporting a look that was rather Christ-like, George Harrison spent four weeks at #1 in the US and five weeks at #1 in the UK at the end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971 with “My Sweet Lord,” the song that kicked off a kind of Jesus-mania in ’70s rock.
Speaking to his Krishna consciousness, while throwing in a couple of hallelujahs, Harrison was famously accused of copping the “doo-lang” backgrounds from the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” (a song about a boy which has been known to double as a spiritual). And yet, Harrison disavowed the influence, claiming his inspiration came from “Oh Happy Day”, a top five 1969 hit for the Edwin Hawkins Singers. “Oh Happy Day” grew from a Northern California gospel choir’s homemade record derived from an English hymn dating back to the 18th Century (Spiritualized also revived “Oh Happy Day” in the late 20th Century).
Gospel music had been rocking souls since at least the 18th century in the Americas, where African rhythms joined field, work, and folk songs, to old hymns from the British Isles, and made way for a new form of expression giving voice to the inner lives of the oppressed. In his book People Get Ready!A New History of Black Gospel Music, author Robert Darden speaks to the theological ideas and arguments behind the music: By evoking a more powerful spirit, gospel-inspired music served to fight the demonic institutions of slavery and Jim Crow law. The 20th Century story of how church singers like Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, and more turned gospel into soul is among the greatest stories in music history ever told, as is the origin story of the blues, a music where heaven and hell, and Jesus and the devil, go head to head regularly. Rock ‘n’ soul were built on this gospel and blues foundation and remain inextricably intertwined, their resonances in rock proving to be everlasting (I write about gospel, blues, soul and music’s connection to people’s liberation extensively throughout this site and in my book, Keep on Pushing).
Here’s an example of how a song traveled in the Year of Our Lord, 1971, a big one for Jesus and his greatest hits: In May, Gene MacLellan’s song “Put Your Hand in the Hand,” the title song from the debut album by Canadian rock group Ocean, became a million-seller and high-charting Billboard hit (I’ve seen it listed as a #2 as well as #3). The song was originally cut by Anne (“Snowbird”) Murray and went on to be recorded by Jesus-loving artists from Elvis Presley to Loretta Lynn. “Put Your Hand in the Hand” hearkens back to the first gospel song to score a number one crossover hit: “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” as done by Laurie London in 1958. Mahalia Jackson—gospel’s reigning queen of soul during the civil rights era—would also put the song in Billboard’s Top 100. The Jesus rock of Ocean did not turn out to be quite as enduring or memorable, though the Jesus music movement continued to gain momentum in the ’70s thanks to, well, Jesus, and the 1970 Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice album project turned hit Broadway play bearing his name.
In May of 1971, songs from Jesus Christ Superstar with Ian Gillan (Deep Purple) in the role of Jesus were also making their way to the charts. Murray Head (as Judas) and his version of “Superstar” were sitting at #20 and peaked at #14 in the US in June. Another song from the show, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” the “Him” being Jesus, and the “I” being Mary Magdalene (as sung by Yvonne Elliman) rose to #28, also in 1971.
Even the Rolling Stones got into the Jesus spirit that year: After the darkness that marked Altamont, they traded “Sympathy for the Devil” for when the Lord gets ready and “You Got To Move” by Mississippi Fred McDowell (from their Sticky Fingers album). Here’s a clip of them in 1975 performing it with Ollie Brown and Billy Preston joining on vocals.
In 1972, the gospel-based Staple Singers busted the crossover charts with Be Altitude, featuring the hits, “I’ll Take You There,” “Respect Yourself,” and the lesser-known “Who Do You Think You Are (Jesus Christ the Superstar)?”
In 1972, the Off-Broadway play, Godspell, scored a hit off its original cast album with “Day By Day” which went to #13 on the pop charts. Following the West End success of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1973 it was turned into a hit film, directed by Norman Jewison. Here’s a clip of Carl Anderson in the role of Judas, rockin’ the Jehovah out of the title song, followed by Murray Head’s chart hit version.
Curiously, it’s another Norman—not Jewison nor Greenbaum but Larry—who is widely considered to be the godfather of the aforementioned contemporary Christian rock. Bob Dylan followed his work, and the Pixies’ Black Francis grew up on it. A bit of a wild card, Larry Norman is generally well-regarded as an artist, remembered as a risk-taker, an experimentalist, and an iconoclast who didn’t cotton to the status quo in rock or Christian music. Also contributing to the coalescence of contemporary Christian music was Explo ’72, a festival concert that gathered over 75,000 young Jesus people in Dallas to see Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Larry Norman, and gospel artist Andrae Crouch for a kind of “religious Woodstock,” so-called by the Reverend Billy Graham, who was in attendance. According to author Andrew Beaujon’s book Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock, Explo set in motion the beginnings of the contemporary Christian music industry. Soon after, specialty labels formed, and the contemporary Christian music market was born to boom. “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music” was Norman’s answer to conservatives, who thought rockin’ for Jesus was not in concordance with the road to salvation. Though surely as the Jesus rockers were dismissed from the inner sanctum of evangelical Christiandom, they had also impacted the sound of church hymns too: Catholic mass went “folk” in the ’70s and some of those freshly arranged hymns remain in church repertoire today.
In 1972, Rhodes Scholar Kris Kristofferson sang “Jesus Was a Capricorn” on the album of the same title. He didn’t stay a Jesus rocker for long, though he had a definite claim in Jesus, given he was named for him—twice. “Morning Has Broken”, a Top 10 Cat Stevens hit in 1972, was based on the Gaelic hymn “Bunnesan” that’s been sung in churches as “Morning Has Broken” since at least 1930s. The Englishman of Greek origin has long since converted to Islam, first as a non-singer, now singing again. “Jesus is Just Alright” as covered by the Doobie Brothers was also a chart hit in 1972, though the Byrds had already recorded the Art Reynolds song in 1969.
Though by far, the biggest news in Jesus rock of the ’70s was Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity. Before developing his own distinct song style in the mid-‘60s, his lyrics vigorously opposed to injustice, Dylan had started out his career adapting old spirituals for his own form of protest song. By the mid-‘70s his Rolling Thunder Revue was as devoted to seeking justice for falsely accused prisoner Ruben “Hurricane” Carter as it was to an excessive rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Following that harrowing passage, Dylan, in characteristic retreat mode, embraced Christianity. Born again, he cut two gospel albums, 1979’s Slow Train Coming and Saved (1980) produced by self-proclaimed Jewish atheist, Jerry Wexler.
“Gotta Serve Somebody” from Slow Train Coming won the Best Male Rock Vocal Grammy and has since been covered by gospel artist Shirley Caesar, blueswoman Etta James, Neville brother Aaron, Texas troubadour Willie Nelson, marvelous Mavis Staples, and Hammond B-3 giant Booker T. with the M.G.’s. while John Lennon (“Serve Yourself”), and Devo (undercover as a Christian rock act, Dove) famously parodied it. At the time of recording, Dylan was pilloried: His 14-night stand at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater in 1979 featured nightly picketers stationed outside the theater. The reviews were radically divided. On 1981’s Shot of Love, Dylan answered some of his critics on songs which mixed secular and sacred and yielded at least one of his most enduring spiritual works, “Every Grain of Sand.”
In part owed to the controversy inspired by Bob Dylan’s gospel period, some believers choose to keep distinctly sacred references to Jesus out of their songs while others use his name as an invocation. Dylan faithful Patti Smith famously opened her rendition of “Gloria” with the line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”; she titled a song and an album “Easter”, while “Ghost Dance” features the holy incantation, “we shall live again.” Her friend and collaborator Robert Mapplethorpe’s Catholicism left its fingerprint on her; she continues to be inspired by poet and artist William Blake whose portraits of the divine move beyond confines of religious dogma.
Punk and alternative rock depictions of Jesus are not unheard of: Joey Ramone sang “I’m Not Jesus”, and Jesus rode beside Paul Westerberg in “Can’t Hardly Wait”, while a rather unholy trinity of bands, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Jesus Lizard, and Jesus Jones all named themselves after the big man. Flaming Lips, Ministry, and Spacemen 3 have got their Jesus songs too; they are but a small sample of alterna-Jesus references. Indie rock has its share of artists like Pedro the Lion and Sufjan Stevens whose Jesus-inspired work stays more on the downlow, like that of U2, Bruce Cockburn, Moby, Midnight Oil, Polyphonic Spree, and Lambchop: All make allusions to JC and Christianity while enjoying success in the secular world.
In hip hop, the Lord’s name is occasionally given a shout-out, but none took on Jesus better than Kanye “Yeezus” West whose 2004 single, “Jesus Walks” dared to speak of the very subject we’re talking about: With the Jesus movement in rock long in decline, to sing about him was often considered the equivalent of career suicide, yet West’s success was an exception. “Jesus Walks” peaked at #11 Pop and #2 R&B, sold over half a million copies, and was certified gold.
In 2008, the gospel songs of Dylan were compiled by the music’s greatest stars on Gotta Serve Somebody. The career of gospel songstress Mavis Staples has achieved a full-blown rock revival and continues to grow stronger following her contemporary albums produced by Ry Cooder and Jeff Tweedy. Southern California roots band Dead Rock West revived the Staples classic, “This May Be the Last Time” (the song the Rolling Stones borrowed for “The Last Time”), alongside works by Blind Willie Johnson and the Jesus and Mary Chain on their gospel-inspired collection Bright Morning Stars. Though the charts may never again see the high number of Jesus jams the ‘70s saw, if you’ve got the time to seek, you’ll find plenty more from where these came.
Happy Easter to all Jesus rockers, readers, and to people of all faiths: May your spirit be refreshed as you continue in the struggle for peace and justice (A version of this column originally ran in Crawdaddy! as The Origin of Song and appears elsewhere on this site annually).
I reviewed the new documentary on the life of jazz trumpet player and composer, Lee Morgan, in the new edition of No Recess! magazine. 
Denise Sullivan 