Frank Morgan and me

From redemption to peace...

Although I would see him many times, this photo is how I remember Frank Morgan - the way he looked in 1988, the first time I saw him play in the Bay Area.

My good friend Luis and I went to see him play that night with the Cedar Walton Trio. I don’t recall where but it was in an odd location like a Holiday Inn, not one of the usual Bay Area jazz hot spots. It was a small room with few people, so we were able to sit up close - like the front row. It was a defining moment in my jazz journey.

Here’s the song that makes me feel the way I did the first time I saw Frank Morgan play:

Knowing what I did about Frank Morgan’s journey before I saw and heard him that night, I was surprised first by his strength of spirit and then by the quality of his playing.

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In the Fall of 1988, at about the same time, I was reading a lot of Isak Dinesen. In particular, I liked Anecdotes of Destiny:

The book’s second story, Babette’s Feast, particularly caught my attention. In some odd way, General Loewenhielm and his character reminded me of Frank Morgan. Late in the story, reflecting on his life with a group of old friends, the General gave this soliloquy:

Man, my friends, is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! That which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For Mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!

It took Frank Morgan 30 years for mercy and truth to meet together.

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Here’s another song, a duet with Kenny Burrell, that makes me feel like I did when I first saw Frank Morgan play.

When we left off last week, I was living in Campbell. I lived there until the fall of 1989, when I found a place in Cupertino, just before the big earthquake. I had left the Marine Division of Westinghouse (too much like the Army) and got a job at Altus Corporation, a small company trying to figure out, of all things, how to make rechargeable lithium batteries. I did that for a while and eventually moved to Chicago. But that is another story for a little further down the river.

Shortly after I moved to Cupertino, I picked up a job on the weekends working for Tom Hayden at Wessex Books in Menlo Park. I’d go there after work on Friday and then work Saturdays. It was a great little place, and I had a lot of fun there. I worked with Luis, an English professor from Foothill College. We both loved books and jazz and became close friends.

So here’s a true confession. As I look back on my jazz journey, I can say that it has been a solitary journey. I fancy that my journey was something like Fred Astaire’s great song from The Band Wagon: By Myself.

Perhaps a little dramatic, but it was a solitary pursuit until I met Luis. It would be over 30 years later before I would share my journey with another, a gentleman and my jazz mentor, Lenni.

Anyway, Luis and I struck up an instant friendship at Wessex Books. We were both completely into jazz, and, luckily, the late 1980s was a terrific time to be in the Bay Area. The jazz scene at that time was really on fire. Luis and I would pick out all the cool shows and go together. As I look back now, it’s incredible the amount of great jazz artists and music we were able to take in. Perhaps the best of all was that first Frank Morgan show.

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Pre-prison Releases

Frank Morgan’s musical career was cut short by his constant struggle with addiction. As a result, he recorded sparingly. Here’s one of my favorite early Frank Morgan songs on Lyle Murphy’s Four Saxophones in Twelve Tones.

Here’s another classic from his 1955 debut LP, with the great Carl Perkins on piano and Howard Roberts on guitar:

I got both of these albums from Honest Jon’s in Columbia, South Carolina, which surprisingly had more incredible West Coast music than the West Coast.

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It’s important to backtrack a little here. Up until that time, I came to jazz via first the old 78 RPM records, movie soundtracks, and John Mayall, then the more jazz fusion sounds of Grover Washington Jr. and Weather Report. Later, I found the old New York label LPs in what I call Ground Zero - my college library in New York. I caught some good jazz shows in the Village and then again in the Netherlands and London while in the service. By the time I returned to California, I was steeped in West Coast Jazz, so I never really listened to Be Bop. It seems odd to have skipped over Charlie Parker and then circled back to him years later, but that’s the way my journey went - sort of backward. So that first time I heard Frank Morgan I realized he was a Bebop player. At the end of his shows, he would always say, “Bebop Lives.”

As it turns out, I came to Bebop first via Frank Morgan and then from the movie, Bird, which came out with much fanfare in 1988:

I saw the film premiere at the UC Theatre in Berkeley on Oct 13, 1988. It was part of the Jazz in the City 1988 program. After that, I started to explore Bebop’s roots.

In 1989, Luis and I went to A Salute to Charlie Parker, as part of the KJAZ 30 Years of Jazz show at the Calvin Simmons Theater in Oakland. It was a terrific show that featured Frank Morgan on the alto sax. The second half of the show was Frank Morgan playing with strings.

In 1989, Frank Morgan was on top of the world. But his journey to get there was a long and hard road. And the sound of Frank Morgan’s horn in 1989 was the sound of redemption.

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This is how I do not want to remember Frank Morgan: A71037, his San Quentin inmate number.

Following in the footsteps of his hero Charlie Parker, Frank Morgan started taking heroin at 17 and subsequently became addicted. He supported his drug habit through criminal behavior, like robbery, check forgery, and fencing stolen property. His first drug arrest came in 1955, the same year his debut album was released. By 1962, he was in San Quentin State Prison. In 1985, while out of prison on parole, he made his recording comeback with the Contemporary Records LP, Easy Living. His final incarceration, for which he turned himself in on a parole violation, ended on December 7, 1986.

Frank Morgan said, “I was a superstar in prison. All the fear of going to prison was taken out of the whole thing because it became a really comfortable haven. It's taken me a long time to get out of the comfortable situation of the prison and really face up to life. If, after my first solo at the Village Vanguard after I came out, they hadn't applauded me so loudly, if someone had said "Boo", I'd have run back to San Quentin.”

In 2014, Frank Morgan’s story was released in the film Sound of Redemption. This is a thoughtful and wonderful dedication.

Here’s the trailer for the film:

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Coming Home

Frank Morgan returned to Minneapolis in the fall of 2005. I would go on to see him play at the 2006 Twin Cities Hot Summer Jazz Festival at the Dakota Jazz Club, and with George Cables at the Artists’ Quarter in St. Paul. He was beautiful and, it seemed to me, had found peace. I should say, that when I heard Frank Morgan’s horn in 2006, eighteen years after I heard him for the first time in the Bay Area, it was the sound of peace.

This is from a 2007 interview with journalist and author Wanda Ali Batin Sabir:

Wanda Sabir: So you hadn’t lived there (Minnesota) since you were six? So when you left to go to Los Angeles to live with your father….

Frank Morgan: Well actually I left to live with my father’s mother. I was raised by both my grandmothers. In Minneapolis, I lived with my mother’s mother. Then when I moved to Milwaukee I lived with my father’s parents: Grandmother Lizzy. (Both were Native American, his grandfather full-blood.)

I played at my father’s funeral in Hawaii and more recently at my mother’s memorial services in Minneapolis, which prompted me coming home. I came home to see my mother a few months before she died. I left because I had to go on the road. She died 20 minutes after I left. They called me in Chicago, and I came back and a few months after that my family called me and said, ‘We’d like you to come home to live so we can take care of you.’

So he returned to Minneapolis. Frank Morgan’s musical journey ended where it started, with his family back home in Minnesota. He died in Minneapolis on Friday, December 14, 2007, nine days before his 74th birthday.

Next week, we’ll take a journey a little further down that Big River called Jazz and follow it into some deeper jazz waters….

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Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.

Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that….

Until then, keep on walking….