FRANK MORGAN The Scene Is Clean By GARY GIDDINS in THE VILLAGE VOICE December 16, 1986 ©Gary Giddins and The Village Voice

Think of the Charlie Parker era and you may think of dark glasses, narcotics, gray pinstripes, bebop jive, cool dudes, and the lost glamour of an untouchable musical coterie. That's how deeply the superficial aspects of the period became identified with a sensibility, hip but not yet beat, that tried to transcend art. Think of the Charlie Parker era and you also think of a music that was brazen with self-assurance, giddy with its own virtuosity, fierce to the point of arrogance, yet so nervously, tenderly vulnerable that its ballads were taken at tempos slow enough to seem nearly motionless, with melodies lagging way behind the beat, framing dramatic rests as telling as the notes. As bop in its pure form evolved into subsequent styles of jazz, it sacrificed much of its own glimmer, its authority and beauty. Considered frantic and wild in the parlous days of its birth, bop offers a heartening rigor for these parlous times. Small wonder that when an authentic apostle of Charlie Parker's dreamworld springs into view, the response mixes gratitude with confirmation. In the '70s, we witnessed the resurrections of Red Rodney, Dexter Gordon and Art Pepper. Now we have the return of Frank Morgan. Frank Morgan, who opened at the Village Vanguard last night (December 9) and is now visiting New York for the first time, is an alto saxophonist who participated in the Central Avenue days of West Coast jazz. His career got off to a promising start. An acquaintance of Charlie Parker since childhood--his father, the guitarist Stanley Morgan, had known Parker in Kansas City when the two of them traveled with Harlan Leonard and His Rockets--he showed an immediate affinity for Parker's blues locutions and harmonic resourcefulness. Before he turned 21, he had recorded with Teddy Charles and Kenny Clarke and completed an album of his own with Wardell Gray, Conte Candoli, and Carl Perkins. Before that, at 17, he was offered a chance to play in New York. The trip east has been delayed 35 years, most of which time Morgan was caught on the California penal system treadmill. "In retrospect," he says of the original offer, "I guess that's when I decided to fail. I knew enough about heroin to know that it was certain failure--that if anything would insure failure, becoming a heroin addict would be it. I had full knowledge." When we met, last August in Los Angeles, Morgan had recently issued the second album of his comeback, Lament (Contemporary), and was finally enjoying a success that seemed likely to have been his in 1955, when GNP issued Frank Morgan with a blurb anointing him as the successor to Parker. Soft-spoken, candid, and disarmingly mild, he discussed his readiness, at long last, to enjoy the fruits of his talent. He had nearly 10 years to wrestle with the issue. In 1977, GNP reissued his first album and asked Leonard Feather to write the notes. It was assumed that Morgan was dead, but Feather asked around and learned that he had been released from a rehabilitation center. He still couldn't find him, but a few days after he'd given up, the phone rang: "Leonard? This is Frank Morgan." During the next two years, Morgan participated as a sideman in recordings by Benny Powell and L. Subramaniam, but he wasn't ready for a career. On April 2, 1985 (Morgan remembers the dates of each entry and release), he finished a six-month prison sentence for a parole violation and heard that the record producer Richard Bock was looking for him. Bock told him Fantasy Records was willing to sign him for an album on its Contemporary label. He recorded Easy Living that summer, and cleaned himself once again of his habit. He even turned himself in to clear the slate. After seeing another four months, he was ready. Morgan's unlined face denies his 53 years and harrowing experiences. Perhaps the Ojibwa blood on his father's side explains the strong cheekbones and the russet coloring. His face has a shining, open quality and the glitter in his eyes counters the low volume and careful articulation of his voice. He has an immaculate presence, which was underscored by a white shirt patterned with lace. With his companion of many years, the artist Rosalinda Kolb, whom he credits with saving his life, he talked of his life, and the subject often turned to Charlie Parker and the era that produced and destroyed so many musicians of his generation. "I was born in Minneapolis on December 23, 1933. We moved to Milwaukee when I was six and California when I was 14. My father had me playing guitar from the time I was two, but that changed when I was seven and he was playing with a band in Detroit. I joined him there for Easter vacation and he took me to the Paradise Theater. At that time, several of the movie houses had stage shows and this one happened to feature Jay McShann's band. The singer, Walter Brown, was singing 'Hootie Blues,' and when Charlie Parker stood up to take his solo, it changed my whole life. I decided I wanted to be an alto saxophone player then and there. "I met Bird that day. My father talked to him about me playing the alto and Bird suggested that they start me out on clarinet. I thought Bird was going to pick out the horn for me, but he didn't show up. But Wardell Gray and Teddy Edwards, who were both playing alto then with Howard McGhee's band, did. They picked out a clarinet for me, and you know I was disappointed. I was a little mad with Bird, because I wanted to play saxophone. I didn't understand that he thought he was getting me off to a proper start. And it's perfectly true. Just to get a sound out of the clarinet, a child has to develop greater control than you might ever get as a young saxophone player. It proved to be a blessing, insofar as I was able to develop a clarinet technique that has carried over into my saxophone playing." Morgan lives in Topanga, but the two of us were in L.A. to work on a video documentary on Parker, for which I was to interview Morgan. As we got closer to the taping, he assembled his alto and warmed up with a blues. He remarked, "Bird once said to me that he believed in playing the blues on everything. I kind of questioned that and he said that you could play with a kind of blues feeling on everything, no matter if it's a church hymn or a song. You could say he was playing the blues all the time, whether it was 'Parker's Mood' or 'April in Paris.' " Morgan's alto sound is supple and lyrical in a way that recalls Benny Carter almost as much as Parker. His tone is fuller in the lower notes than on top, and it can be prim and dry, which makes his frequent use of pinched high notes to pace himself and increase tension all the more effective. In his current playing, such as the recent recordings of "Embraceable You" and "Until It's Time for You to Go," he sculpts notes, feeling his way into the melody--something you don't hear as much in the early work, with its exceedingly legato phrasing. His variations gently probe the chords, shyly turning around phrases and then picking up steam with a double-time barrage. He constantly evokes Parker but he also invokes a classic approach to the instrument itself. "Well, Charlie Parker's alto saxophone differed not greatly from Johnny Hodges or Benny Carter insofar as the approach to the horn. The harmonies that Bird played really made him different. I think his tone was as beautiful as Hodges or Carter. Bird played a little more forceful saxophone." He demonstrated the point by playing "Come Sunday," first in the style of Hodges and then as he thought Parker might have played it, replete with progressive chords and asymmetrical phrasing. When Frank Morgan and his family arrived on Central Avenue, it was the hub of music and glamour and temptation. "We got to L.A. in the summer of 1947. My father opened a club called Casablanca, and all the heavy boppers played there and movie stars came over. Bird was revered by then--quoted by Hollywood, treated like a star. It was nothing to see Ginger Rogers or Ava Gardner or Gregory Peck or many of the very popular movie stars listening to him. Because he knew my father so well, he treated me almost like a son. He was very interested in helping me to play the saxophone and seeing that I only saw the right side of life. But it seemed almost socially acceptable to use drugs, as far as the people in and around music. I thought the heroin and the bebop and the whole lifestyle thing went together. I thought that one used heroin to play like Charlie Parker played. He was very disappointed when he found out I was using. I thought he would be extremely happy. I couldn't wait for Bird to get back to town when I turned 17 and started using, so that I could let him know that I was in the club--a member of the, you know, heroin addicts. It hurt him bad. He confided in me that people like me and Jackie McLean, and people all over the world, not just those that have been written about and recorded, but many young lives that were taken before they had the chance, hurt him because we didn't have the sense to just take the music and leave that part of his life to him. I think Bird took it to his grave with a great amount of sorrow. 'Can't you see what it's done to me?' he said. 'I mean I thought you had sense enough to bypass that part of it.' He said, 'I was hoping that's what you would do, that maybe you were past the point where it was really dangerous.' "Clearly, I wasn't. I don't think there was anything Bird could have done that would have stopped me from using. I chose to think that he was just trying to keep that good thing to himself. That's how stupid I was. And yet I knew that his addiction had a tremendous effect on his everyday existence. He didn't get a chance to practice as much as he would have liked, because having the habit is demanding. You must go where the drug tells you to go. You must find when it's available before you do anything else. I don't think one is going to sit down and practice eight or nine hours and say, well, I'll go score some heroin later on. It doesn't work like that. It's been my experience that when you wake up in the morning, the monkey is biting on the neck saying, feed me. And I don't mean feed me later. I don't mean feed me after you practice eight hours. I mean feed me now." Parker died in 1955, shortly after Morgan completed his debut album. "When I first heard that Charlie Parker had died it was a Monday night and I was on the bandstand at the California Club in Los Angeles. I was blessed enough to be working with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray. James Moody and Gene Ammons came to see us that night. Conte Candoli was there and Hampton Hawes, though I don't remember if he was playing piano. But we were all there at the California Club when we heard that Bird had died and we took advantage of the fact to announce a long intermission. We proceeded--except Moody and Candoli--to celebrate Bird's death by doing the very thing that killed him. That's the way we celebrated Bird's passing, to go out and do some junk. It would have been better if we'd realized it was time to stop. If Bird's passing could have made us say none of us will use heroin from this point on, maybe Wardell wouldn't have died later that same year... and Gene Ammons.... " After that year, Morgan went underground. Yet except for periods in the Los Angeles County jail system, he never strayed too far from music. At most penal institutions, there were bands made up of inmates, and Morgan was greeted as a celebrity. He was constantly made gifts of mouthpieces, drugs, food, cigarettes. "The greatest big band I ever played with was in San Quentin. Art Pepper and I were proud of that band. We had Jimmy Bunn, who still plays around California, and Frank Butler, and some other musicians who were known and some who weren't, but they could play. We played every Saturday night for what they called a Warden's Tour, which showed paying visitors only the cleanest cell blocks and exercise yards. But people would take that tour just to hear the band. For the rest, I read a lot, played chess a lot. I was in San Quentin for two years. And now the Creator has given me the chance to play the music that Charlie Parker made it possible for us to play. I don't want to play like Charlie Parker. I want to play as well. I want to play my own soul, which is what Bird told me I was doing all the time. He felt I might have been taking some of his ideas but he said, 'Listen, when it filters itself though your system, then it comes out as you. It might have me going in, but it's you going out.' The music he's given us has had a tremendous effect on all of life. Even though he was a drug addict, his music spoke of many things, and it comes out so strongly--it's a very beautiful, peaceful message in his music. That's why it's so alive. Now I'm playing it and people are coming to listen, and they really listen. I'm working with musicians like Cedar Walton, Buster Williams, and Billy Higgins. There have been offers from Europe, but I haven't been able to get the change in parole status to do that. But I'm finally getting to New York, and I don't feel I have to fail anymore. It's like a beautiful dream. My life has changed so drastically, each day I have to question myself to make sure I'm not dreaming." ***********************************************************************

MarsJazz Booking Agency  PHONE:  434-979-6374    FAX:  434-979-6179 1006 Ashby Place; Charlottesville, VA 22901-4006 USA