I Called Him Morgan

It’s a tac­tic of many a mod­ern screen­writer to par­lay the high dra­ma of clas­si­cal tragedy into a more approach­able and relat­able tem­plate. Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Mor­gan does this too, but his tragedy is ripped from cold real­i­ty, as it relays the heart­break­ing tale of superla­tive bop trum­peter, Lee Morgan.

Known for help­ing forge the defin­ing sound for the Blue Note label, as well as releas­ing such sem­i­nal long­play­ers as The Sidewinder and Lee-Way, Mor­gan fits very clean­ly into the tor­ment­ed jazzman mould as seen in such movies as Clint Eastwood’s Bird (about Char­lie Park­er). From aus­pi­cious begin­nings play­ing along­side the likes of Dizzy Gille­spie, Morgan’s nat­ur­al tal­ent began to wane as his habit for hard drugs devel­oped. He burned holes into his head while in the heady throes of over­dose, and he even turned up to a band ses­sion in his slip­pers hav­ing sold his shoes for dope.

Enter sal­va­tion in the form of sassy, out­spo­ken Helen Moore, who lit­er­al­ly dragged him from the gut­ter and helped re-stoke a dwin­dling cre­ative flame. But then with con­fi­dence renewed, Mor­gan took off in a new direc­tion. Against a back­drop of pun­ish­ing tour sched­ules, club nights, TV appear­ances and Jazz-based activism, the film projects an inti­mate por­trait of these star-crossed lovers with the aid of two taped inter­views: one with Lee in the ear­ly ​’70s talk­ing around his cre­ative process; the oth­er with Helen just one month before her death in 1996, and clear­ly look­ing to offload the hefty emo­tion­al bur­den of her lat­er life and make a clean break with her many demons.

Collin’s excep­tion­al, atmos­pher­ic film avoids the hys­te­ria and hyper­bole of sim­i­lar true crime doc­u­men­taries to ush­er this del­i­cate sto­ry in with a pal­pa­ble sense of sor­row rather than a desire to retroac­tive­ly point the fin­ger of jus­tice. There’s no hatred here, just regret. There are no con­spir­a­cies or attempts at high­fa­lutin jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, just accep­tance that some real­ly bad things hap­pen and that fate some­times con­spires to make those things even worse.

The use of archive footage under­neath Helen Morgan’s some­times forced con­fes­sions makes for a heady jux­ta­po­si­tion, con­nect­ing her words with an era before every­thing went wrong. Plus, Collin man­ages to rope in many of Morgan’s con­tem­po­raries to deliv­er first-hand rem­i­nisces – there are no hang­ers-on or rub­ber­neck­ers here, just friends, fam­i­ly and close col­leagues only.

It means the por­trait built of Mor­gan is stark, but also more refined and mean­ing­ful. But the thing that makes this film so des­per­ate­ly sad is the footage of him play­ing, each time like he knows it’s his last day on Earth.