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- MUSIC, Page 87Lifesaving Sounds
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- Jazzman Frank Morgan swings away from prison and drugs
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- By JAY COCKS -- With reporting by Kathryn Jackson Fallon/New
- York
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- It's a sort of benediction. Or perhaps just a simple
- acknowledgment. "I would first like to thank you, the listener,
- for saving my life," he says after the music's over. "And I
- would like you to accept these notes, these true feelings, in
- peace . . ."
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- Good thing that coda, which is titled Gratitude, comes at
- the end of Frank Morgan's album Mood Indigo. Hearing it first
- and taking it at face value, casual listeners might figure they
- were in for an overdose of New Age good vibes and reach for the
- off button. That would mean missing out on some elegant alto
- sax, the kind of jazzmanship that combines the hip and the
- heartfelt in an accessible, up-to-the-minute sound.
-
- Frank Morgan is 56, and his time has finally rolled around.
- For a long while there, time looked as if it would roll right
- over him. He has lived out the sad stereotype of the jazzman's
- life: near genius, full junkie, part-time thief, full-time con.
- He spent most of the years between 1954 and 1985 behind bars.
- Not that he always minded. At San Quentin he was co-leader,
- with Art Pepper, of the warden's band. There was always a way
- -- an easy way -- to score whatever he wanted, from alcohol to
- cocaine. Most of all, as Morgan now recognizes, prison gave him
- a way to lie low, to hide from himself and the demands of his
- gift. There was always someone around, he recalls, who could
- say, "If they didn't keep you locked up all the time, you could
- have been the greatest in the world."
-
- He can't lie low anymore. Mood Indigo has been on the
- Billboard jazz chart for the past 15 weeks and is currently
- perched at No. 5. Lyrical in mood, it recalls John Coltrane's
- great 1962 Ballads album as it rephrases hardy perennials by
- Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Coltrane (with an assist
- on two tracks from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis). Although Morgan
- was tutored in the dizzying strictures of bebop by Charlie
- Parker, his recent playing has become less slashing, his tone
- more glowing, his lines more feelingly supple. The new sound is
- certainly enticing, and has helped Morgan get some of the
- attention he dodged for so long. Last week he was a guest on
- Jane Pauley's first prime-time special, about people who have
- dramatically changed their lives. This week he plays at
- Kimball's in San Francisco, next week at Birdland in New York
- City.
-
- Born in Minneapolis to a jazz-guitarist father and a
- 14-year-old mother, Morgan was playing club dates in Los
- Angeles when he was still a teenager. He'd back up Billie
- Holliday or Josephine Baker at night, then go to high school
- during the day. By 17, he had himself a heroin habit. He
- received a stern lecture on the evils of using hard drugs from
- the Yardbird, who undercut his position by promptly sampling
- Morgan's stash. "Like it or no," Morgan says, "what he was
- saying was not nearly as loud as what he was doing."
-
- Morgan will say one thing for drugs, though: "They'll help
- you to do anything in the way of failure, if you want that."
- He doesn't, not now. At the moment, Morgan seems to have got
- himself pretty well together. He's been on a methadone program
- for more than four years, and he's married to painter Rosalinda
- Kolb, with whom he shares a plant-laden house in Brooklyn's Red
- Hook section. Of all his recording plans, he is most
- enthusiastic about the possibility of playing with "a larger
- ensemble, with strings, maybe the New York Philharmonic." No
- wonder he can get away with that kind of Gratitude. Hear his
- voice break a little as he speaks, and you know that, against
- heavy odds, he has made himself a lot to be grateful for.
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