“It’s All Music”

Celebrating Lee Morgan: A Miracle 50 Years In the Making
By Jean-Victor Nkolo

Cold streets. 

Downtown Manhattan, an air of sadness.

The East Village looked like a place out of a Fritz lang movie. The clouds were almost like the black and white smoke-filled background from Fritz Lanag’s “Metropolis”. Thin crowds walking on pavements as if they had just been released from the corridors of Lang’s Moloch, the coronavirus pandemic plying shoulders and keeping mouths shut.

50 years ago, the snowstorm and bitter cold at the same place were not harsh enough to silence the jazz confluence emerging from caverns and taverns. Salvador Dali and other luminaries would grace nearby dungeons. Slugs’ Saloon was getting its street credentials. 

As true as A,B,C, one ghost from yesteryear came alive.  50 years apart, the date of 19 February made history. On B avenue, 9B9 to be precise, that history was both celebrated and corrected. It was about Lee Morgan, the epic ghost.

From a tiny, unsuspecting space, feeble lights came through a glass door, dying and reappearing again on the pavement of B avenue. The lights were obscured by beings in their dark coats, packed in what could well have been a speakeasy. From the street, it was difficult to guess what was going on inside. What is a party or a funeral? A mass or a voodoo ritual? Or what is a union meeting or some bourgeois wine and cheese gathering? Seen from the street, the kabuki-like image projected a scene that looked like beings moving inside a prehistoric dark cavern. Those who knew had the codes could enter the speakeasy. A refined Sydney was at the door, checking patrons in. Two kind Cerberus - Alejandro and Juan - helped keep the gates to hell. They both looked like not so worn-out veterans of the Spanish civil war. Alejandro had the humor of someone who spent time in Carabanchel and Juan was as efficient and enigmatic as someone who could have carried operations behind the lines of Franco, the Caudillo of Spain. Hannah was a curandera with her pots of distilled or not so distilled Cachaça and other bottles.  

Lee Morgan Devotees 

Inside, Lee Morgan devotees assembled in silence as if they awaited a sign from a priest or shaman. 50 years had passed since Morgan’s blood was spilled at Slug’s Saloon, the mythical place yards away in lower Manhattan. Blueprint for Accountability and Culture Project founder Allan Buchman were determined to celebrate someone and something very special on this 19 February, proud to present an important heritage to today's public and younger audiences. 

Lee Morgan died too young, at the age of 33. His work as both composer and instrumentalist continues to influence musicians to this day. The event streamed live on the Internet was masterminded by Will Pomerantz. Allan, the esteemed guru, sat on a chair, fearing the wrath of uncompromising Gods. The speakeasy temple was risky. This was heavy lifting. Events of 50 years ago were charged, heavy, painful. A former Ukrainian restaurant and bar that became a den for drug dealers was later turned into the crime scene of an epic killing. "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson" by George Gurdjieff could be rewritten that night. Slugs’ could come to life again and bite the hands of those who dared play around with life and death at the barrel of a gun with passion and fate. Slugs' in the Far East would be remembered at 9B9 and Lee Morgan’s life celebrated.

Let the music play
Jean-Victor Nkolo, a modern day Oungan summoned the audience and performed a sacred ritual begging for Ancestors’ blessings. Ashe! Ashe! Lee Morgan could rest in peace across the waters that brought him to the Americas from Ifirikya, the mother of all continents. After this ritual, the Oungan priest evoked other geniuses of the trumpet of sax. Music was a magic. Fela Anikulapo Kuti and his Chop and Quench, Manu Dibango and his Soul Makossa, all contemporaries who picked it up in the 70s where Lee Morgan left it, masterfully propelling the embryo of world music into the firmament. The sacred bond and artistic gravitas that united these African giants and the legendary African American that was Lee Morgan made them artistic brothers from the same mother. The production team had served a menu that would make news that evening.

Once the Oungan’s intro was over, the music played so finely. Was Alphonso Horne already born when Lee Morgan died? Indeed, Alphonso had an almost teen-age look. His street credentials hat, chic trousers and genuinely bemused youthful face gave it away. The man was indeed young, and only the raw talent of a blessed artist could have given him the ability to lead a band with such suaveness and grace. A trumpet player, his rendition of the epic Lee Morgan’s piece the Sidewinder was both faithful to Morgan’s artistry and astonishingly vibrant. Saxophonists Christ Lewis must have been of the same age group with Alfonso. His two-piece suit, classy shoes and nice tie gave him the seriousness that matched his mastery of the sax. Bass player Marty Jaffe was outstanding and impressive. He seemed surprised by his own talent, a genuine show of humility. Matts Sullivan had graciously brought a magnificent piano. Mathis Picard played it with abandonment and sheer excellence. The sound and soulfulness from this piano made this an incredibly great moment of good jazz music. Darrian Douglas’ drums were precise and tricky. Art Blakey, who collaborated so much with Lee Morgan, must have applauded from heavens. And when the band brilliantly performed Moanin’, the masterpiece by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with Lee Morgan, the speakeasy was filled with goose bumps. Silence and admiration. Let the music play.

The bygone era came back to life. Music was indeed a magic. There is a level of subtle utterance in Moanin’ that can be compared to a secret being passed to a close confident. Lee Morgan’s trumpet moaning in Moanin’ was that shuffle, that spirit a shaman would pump into a dying body to revive its soul. Alfonso Horne and his friends did it. Beautifully. Kudos to this formidable quintet of some of the finest young jazz musicians living in New York City. As a bridge between generations, songwriter, producer, arranger, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Premik Russell Tubbs who worked with artists such as John McLaughlin, Sting, Jackson Browne, Carlos Santana, Stanley Clarke, Jaco Pastorius, Jean-Luc Ponty and others briefly joined on stage, gifting all with his generous contribution and remarkable talent.

Making news 

Newsworthy audio and video testimonies also graced the memorable evening.

Documentaries and feature movies have been made on Lee Morgan and the fatidic night of 19 February 1972. But who could have predicted that 50 years after at 9B9, news would be made, most significantly by Dr Eddie Henderson? The American jazz trumpet and flugelhorn player, born in 1940 was a close friend and associate of Lee Morgan. A member of pianist Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band, Henderson earned his medical degree and worked a parallel career as a psychiatrist and musician. In a video interview conducted by Alfonso Horne, Henderson rewrote, or rather completed history. He made news during the event streamed live on the Internet. A firsthand witness, he told the audience that weeks before his death a tearful Lee Morgan had admitted to his common wife Helen Morgan that he had a girlfriend, a younger woman. On the eve of his killing, Morgan had spent the full amount of money he had earned the night prior to buy cocaine. $800. A fortune at the time. Yet, Morgan believed that the coke was of poor quality. Fearing a heated dispute with the drug dealer, Lee Morgan asked his common law wife to bring his gun to Slugs’. When she arrived at the club with the gun, she found him with the other woman. It is when Morgan tried to beat her up and push her out into the cold winter storm outside that she instinctively pulled the trigger and shot him. Wikipedia pages and other biographies now stand to be corrected 50 years later after Lee Morgan's untimely demise at Slugs'.

And when all the pages of Wikipedia and other online memories are written, all should remember that the event on 19 February 2022 was a real miracle. Harit Allan Buchman made it again, successfully achieving with selfless friends a heavy lifting and delivering a memorable event that was both newsworthy and of the highest quality, despite very limited means. At the end of the show, it seemed as if for Mr. Buchman, lifting his body from the chair he sat on throughout the event was more difficult for the father of Culture Project and founder of Blueprint for Accountability than operating a miracle that took 50 years to mature. A mystery lifted. A miracle achieved.

Long live Lee Morgan. 

Jean-Victor Nkolo
New York, NY