The first album I ever heard by Frank Morgan — the alto saxophonist, rehabilitated junkie and epochal comeback kid — was Mood Indigo, released in 1989 on Antilles. A serenely hushed affair, it features two takes of "Lullaby," the plainspoken ballad by pianist George Cables. As it happens, Michael Connelly, the best-selling mystery novelist, claims "Lullaby" as a theme song for his chief protagonist, Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch. This interdisciplinary homage, implicit in all of the Bosch novels and stated outright in more than one of them, must be one of the more steadfast and prominent of its kind. (Can you think of another one?)
Pick up a copy of today's paper and you'll find my piece about the Connelly-Morgan connection, occasioned by the news of a forthcoming documentary film, Sound of Redemption.
It was a pleasure speaking with Connelly, a writer justly lauded in his field, and uncommonly transparent about his influences. At one point I mentioned that a scene in Lost Light, in which Harry Bosch visits an old jazz man in a retirement home for his regular saxophone lesson, reminded me of this scene in The Conversation. (In a pseudo-Freudian slip, I initially called it "The Connection." Ha. You get why that's amusing, right?)
Anyway. "Mmm-hmm," Connelly said, and made some other point. But then he circled back:
I just want to mention, going back to The Conversation: that’s got to be one of my top five movies of all time. The guy’s named Harry. And there’s just something about his loneliness and his solitary pursuit that’s just slammed home when he sits there by himself and plays to a record in an apartment where he lives by himself. That image was really influential to me. And I was aware that, if I have Harry pursue this, I’m going to end up with a scene that rips off that movie.
Are you on some level responding to the cinematic notion of the tragic jazz hero? That idea is even more strongly articulated in film than it is in hardboiled fiction.
What is shown in film is this idea that you sacrifice your soul in order to do it right; that there’s this bargain with the devil, that if you want to reach this level of artistic expression that really bares your soul, you don’t use words. You’re making a sound that reveals your soul. That is so difficult, to reach that level, that it has a cost. And these people go into it knowing that. I’m trying to say that with a police detective, there’s a cost to make the kind of music he makes. If you go into darkness every day in your professional life, that darkness is going to get into you. And I think jazz musicians, at least of a certain era, faced that same kind of equation. When someone goes down in a battle for art, there’s something romantic about it and attractive about it. It’s carried into films, and it’s based on an amazing number of real-life tragedies. There's a point made in the film by Gary Giddins, that here is this guy from this era where more people were damaged by this than not. Here’s this guy, and when I finally met him, he was in his 70s, but to me it was the coolest thing.
As you might gather from my framing in the critic's notebook, I'm a little wary of the sentiment behind the whole tragic-romantic jazz hero convention; it often strikes me as overdone, and maybe a little dangerous. If we fall in completely for that archetype, do we then devalue the steady hum of a no-drama guy like Clark Terry? (I don't have an answer to that question, but it seems worth posing regardless.) This isn't to say that I'm owned by my ambivalence. I was gripped by Art and Laurie Pepper's Straight Life, and can't help but apply that subtext when I hear Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section (which I love, btw). There should be no surprise in the fact that Pepper, too, is a frequent allusion in Connelly's novels.
Of course one thing that makes Frank Morgan so unique is the quality and duration of his post-prison comeback, of which Mood Indigo was just one piece. Another album I played a lot at the time was Listen to the Dawn, which has lovely playing by guitarist Kenny Burrell, and a gorgeous take on "It Might As Well Be Spring." Later on I went back and spent quality time with Easy Living, the album that started it all, and A Lovesome Thing, which features some choice Abbey Lincoln (and, incidentally, yet another version of "Lullaby").
There's reason to believe that Sound of Redemption will shed particular light on the state of grace that constituted Morgan's late career. Many of us got to witness it onstage, at the Jazz Standard or elsewhere; some of us got a little closer. In any case, I'll be watching closely to see how this unfolds.
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