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On the night of February 19, 1972, Helen Morgan walked into the East Village bar Slug’s Saloon with a gun in her handbag. She came to see her common-law husband, the great jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, whom she had nursed through heroin addiction. They fought, he literally threw her out; then she walked back in and shot him, handed over her gun and waited for the police to arrive. Many years later, Helen was interviewed about her life with the brilliant but erratic musician, and the tapes of that interview are the backbone of this beautifully crafted and deeply affecting film from Kasper Collin (My Name Is Albert Ayler). An NYFF54 selection. A Submarine Entertainment release.
Collin's approach to this incendiary material is both blatant and oblique - a bit like Lee's playing itself. Thankfully, we hear quite a bit of that playing in the film.
Collin's exceptional, atmospheric film avoids the hysteria and hyperbole of similar true crime documentaries to usher this delicate story in with a palpable sense of sorrow rather than a desire to retroactively point the finger of justice.
This is, like Tracy Chapman's song 'Fast Car,' a quintessential American story, full of promise, hope, heartbreak, tragedy and racism. It is a tragic, confounding and touching story, well told.
"I Called Him Morgan" works as a jazz documentary as well as a bizarre true crime tale about a mysterious crime of passion. All these years later, many questions remain.
[I Called Him Morgan is] a film that is more than just another story about a flawed artist who dies young. You have something that is far closer to a work of art.
Musicians sometimes paraphrase Debussy, or one another, in saying that music is the silence between the notes. I Called Him Morgan has it all -- the notes and the silence, plus the music of spoken language, pitched in rueful tones of recollection.
It's rare that a film makes you feel so acutely in its brief run-time, covering albums and addictions alike, but I Called Him Morgan accomplishes just that.