An article in the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/a-documentary-about-the-life-and-tragic-death-of-the-great-jazz-trumpeter-lee-morgan?mbid=social_facebook
A Documentary About the Life and Tragic Death of the Great Jazz Trumpeter Lee Morgan
By Richard Brody
, October 1, 2016
Lee and Helen Morgan in 1970. Credit Kasper Collin Produktion AB / Courtesy of the Afro-American Newspaper Archives and Research Center
Some of the best offerings in this year’s New York Film Festival are documentaries. The festival opened last night with Ava DuVernay’s powerfully and passionately insightful documentary “13th,” a brilliant analysis of the historical roots of the politics behind today’s scourge of mass incarceration. Then, on Sunday and Monday, the festival will show the Swedish director Kasper Collin’s “I Called Him Morgan,” centered on the relationship between the great trumpeter Lee Morgan and his common-law wife, Helen Morgan, who shot him to death, in a Lower East Side jazz club, in 1972.
The backbone of Collin’s film is the sole audio interview with Helen Morgan, made in 1996, shortly before her death. The story that she tells combines with the story that Collin builds around it to provide a revelatory and moving portrait of a great musician and the other great people, whether celebrated (like musicians with whom Lee Morgan performed) or unheralded (like Helen), on whom his art and his life depended. It’s both a portrait of people and a historical landscape, a virtual vision of American times—the lives of black Americans in the age of Jim Crow and de-facto discrimination in the North—and of the artistry and personal style that arose in response to them.