Book Review: Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture by Tom Perchard

Biographers of musicians face a tough balancing act. In addition to exploring an artist's life, they have to provide sufficient explanation of the music to satisfy those who know music well as well as the average listener who could care less about whether what they hear is a glissando or arpeggio. The task is even tougher when it comes to hard bop jazz players such as trumpeter Lee Morgan, because the music may border on indescribable. While not always successful in the effort, British author Tom Perchard tries to satisfy both kinds of readers in Lee Morgan: His Life, Music and Culture, the first biography of the jazz trumpet player.

Morgan was a teenage phenomenon from the streets of Philadelphia. While still in high school he was playing in clubs with his own ensembles and sat in on jam sessions with such greats as Sonny Stitt (who took the 16-year-old's ego down a notch by calling for one of bebop's most difficult tunes in the hardest key and fastest tempo, showing Morgan he still had a lot to learn). After high school, Morgan also appeared with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers when the group hit Philadelphia for a two-week stand. The speed of his meteoric rise increased when he hit age 18. He moved to New York City to join Dizzy Gillespie's big band and within weeks was offered recording work as a leader himself. In a little over a year he recorded six albums under his own name and appeared as a sideman on numerous others.

But some meteors can also be called falling stars. Perchard insightfully notes that in 1957, when Morgan, just 19, and John Coltrane were part of an ensemble recording a Johnny Griffin LP and Morgan was a sideman on Coltrane's Blue Train, their lives were basically mirror images. That was the year Coltrane renounced heroin and alcohol and would kick off some of his greatest work. Morgan, in turn, was about to begin years of drug addiction. He formally joined the Jazz Messengers the following year and, like so many other members of that band, was soon a heroin addict. In fact, Perchard quotes one source that says Blakey told Morgan and another musician who joined the Jazz Messengers at the same time, "I'll have you guys turned on in two weeks."

While Perchard does laud Morgan's skills and talents, he has no hesitancy to call Morgan's performances as he hears them. For example, he notes that on some tunes Morgan recorded under his own name after arriving in New York, Morgan performs "as if he were in class rather than a recording studio; the trumpeter is very clearly reading the leadhseet as he plays, an eighteen-year-old apprentice learning on the job." Yet there are times that Perchard tends to be perhaps a bit too esoteric for the average reader. For example, in describing a recording of Morgan's in the fall of 1957, he writes: "His sound — now a thing in itself, no longer merely the vehicle of his diction — is more concentrated, adorned with only a gentle vibrato but, with foams of air forming around its edges, sophisticated enough to admit of some detail."

Article Author: Tim Gebhart

Tim Gebhart lives in Sioux Falls, SD, where he practices law in order to provide shelter for his family, his dogs, and his books. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and his blog de guerre is A Progressive on the Prairie.

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