Tom Perchard An Extract

An Extract

The Sound

By the end of the 1950s, and the beginning of his establishing a truly personal style, Lee Morgan had filtered out from his sound much of the wide vibrato and the broad, expressive phraseology that came from the parade ground and cornet literature on which he and his mentors had been raised. But the blues rips and slips up and down that were now central to his style gave Morgan’s playing a new kind of old-fashionedness, apparent when it was placed in comparison with the music of Freddie Hubbard and Booker Little, Morgan’s exact contemporaries. Those three musicians, all born in the middle months of 1938, had by the late-1950s established themselves as the most promising young jazz trumpeters. For Hubbard and Little, much of that promise had been suggested by the complete technical accomplishment and musical sophistication that they displayed, even just past 20.

But Morgan stood apart, his sound in striking contrast to those of his two friends. Both extremely skilled brass players, Hubbard and Little sent air spiralling down their horns with perfect accuracy, hitting notes dead centre. By now, though, Morgan wasn’t that type of player, and with a looser embouchure and less focused air control he pitched notes just off-centre: not enough to be out of tune, but too much to let the instrument ring in loud sympathy as the vibrating metal found its true frequency. Morgan’s sound was veiled as a result, and the air not converted into tone seeped out around the sound’s edge like blue, unlit gas. Still, there was plenty of volume: ‘he was very fiery’, remembered Harold Mabern. ‘Freddie Hubbard still talks about how big Lee’s sound was’.

However lively Morgan’s playing may have been, listeners have often remarked on the presence of a slight sadness, too. If there was an air of sorrow, much of it was due to his diction, and the contrast of brazen phrases with less assured passages that hinted that the bravura masked something uncertain. But, with its tendency to hit notes just above and then fall to just below their proper pitch, even at its most outspoken Morgan’s voice was subtly depressed. That ambiguity, the unreconciled relationship between the sad and the joyous, was always one of the defining features of the blues in its many articulations, the blues at its most pragmatic, standing apart from any idealistic value system that could suppose that sadness might eventually be eliminated from life. On the understanding that nothing could be perfect, and that the perfect would be almost untrue, the lack of trueness in pitch in some way validated the players’ expression – though bona fide out-of-tuneness would of course have meant something else entirely.

By 1960, the rawness of Morgan’s sound indicated that the choices he had made, in aesthetics and perhaps lifestyle, had determined that there would be no way back to the virgin technique of his early career even if he’d wanted one. When Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard shared the stage, as they sometimes did at Birdland and elsewhere, it was Hubbard who stood with possibilities. At will, the trumpeter from Indianapolis would move from a pure, classic trumpet sound, to a breathy, confiding whisper. But Morgan had no such option; he could play with material, contrasting the blues with the cultivated, but his sound was his sound. By 1961, and the time that Morgan ceded his role as the Jazz Messengers’ trumpeter to Hubbard, a ‘legitimate’ sound – as it was called even by jazz musicians – was both behind the Philadelphian and beyond him, and many audiences and musicians must have recognised that, as a result, Morgan was smack in the middle of the blues, guaranteed to tell the truth of who he really was and what he really meant. There was no more pressing a demand of a blues performer.

What do you think Lee had in his playing that made it so communicative, and so much blues in there?

One of the things to me is that Lee was never a real … I mean, he was a technician of sorts.

A trumpeter himself, Don Wilson remembered Lee Morgan’s technical limitations as well as the breezy virtuosity with which Morgan fooled the inattentive into thinking he was always in command. This shouldn’t be overstated, as Morgan was a good instrumentalist, but that in itself wouldn’t have made him a figure of special interest. Instead, one of the attractions of the trumpeter’s playing was (and remains) its expression of a rich musical personality described by the contrast of strength and fragility, perhaps a contrast often only subliminally grasped.

That, and the sheer, risk-taking excitement of his playing. Among jazz musician precedents, Roy Eldridge was one of those whose attempts to communicate led to the very edges of technique, sometimes over, and for perhaps the first half of the 1960s Morgan was the same. In live performance with Art Blakey, Morgan would often push past what may have seemed like a solo’s climax, stamina struggling against the extreme volume of Blakey’s drumming, and continue for another chorus or two. The sound of that striving, and the intense effort it took, counted for something more than the easy vitality of any of Morgan’s better-equipped contemporaries.

This was an ethic of commitment to the musical moment. On a later live recording, Morgan would praise a solo from his tenor saxophonist Bennie Maupin by introducing him as ‘the young man blowing like this was the last time he ever gonna get a chance to pick up his horn. Play everything he knew ‘cause he wouldn’t get no mo chances’. (‘And he ain’t’, says Morgan as an aside, ‘I’ma put some arsenic on his reed’.) Interviewed in 1961, Morgan was reported as saying the same thing of two Philadelphian elders, just as admiringly although in ‘Standard’ English:

You know, Clifford [Brown] and John Coltrane are so much alike – such a wealth of ideas and command of their instruments. Every time I heard Clifford, and now when I hear Trane, I get the impression that the doctor told them, ‘You’ve got to play everything you know today because you won’t get a chance tomorrow.’

Here is the technical, jazz elitist’s formulation of the ‘tombstone disposition’ of classic blues tradition: the celebration of life and being is only meaningful or even possible if the knowledge of death is a constant. It seems that Lee Morgan lived for today as a matter of principle; the life was one thing, but his commitment to performance is why it still matters. Recordings show that not until the hard pursuit of heroin and cocaine caught up with him in the later 1960s did Morgan perform with anything less than total effort, even if the level of attainment varied. (Of course, the varying attainment was an essential part of the truth, and were a performer to rise to the same level of achievement time after time a blues audience might have begun to look for the smoke and mirrors, disillusioned.) Music aside, the commitment and the energy were conveyed in an on-stage movement that placed Morgan at the centre of the action at all times. Pacing around, making signals to the band and leading it even when he was a sideman, Morgan tried to make sure that all eyes remained on him. And when he was actually playing, the trumpeter would dart his head forward on phrases requiring special emphasis, duck down or off to an angle to hit a high note. Jymie Merritt suggested the models for Morgan’s performance ethic as well as his playing style:

I really believe that the main influence was Clifford Brown, I mean at least the spirit of the playing. I remember Clifford Brown well, we’d worked together. I remember him well in terms of his persona, the way he went at the horn like, this is it … I think that Lee adhered to that same sort of precedent, and then playing with Art [Blakey], Art was probably the pinnacle of that kind of expression.