Happy New Year! I’m thrilled about this forthcoming review of The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of Charles Mingus Jr. (@weslpress) in February’s Down Beat. Thank you @EugeneHolley !
All posts by Nichole Rustin-Paschal
Slick Chick, or Helen Morgan’s jazz life
When Helen Morgan shot trumpeter Lee Morgan, she knew the price of the thing. In the aftermath, while locked up at Riker’s awaiting her arraignment, she reflected on her situation: “I said, ‘well Helen, you got to get yourself together. It’s done. You done put yourself in it now. So, you got to get yourself together. You got to get your mind together. You got to get yourself together mentally to accept what you have done.”
Helen, born in rural North Carolina, a mother of two by 14, and a widow by 19, had migrated to New York City in the forties. She first arrived on a visit to her late husband’s family; she stayed having made her place in the world among the music and musicians in an apartment near Birdland. Helen described herself as a “hip square” to Larry Reni Thomas in the only interview she ever gave about her life and the death of Lee Morgan.
February 1972 at Slug’s down in Alphabet City, during a blizzard, Helen snapped. Lee Morgan was in the middle of a week long stay at the club. She killed him with the very gun he’d purchased for her as protection during all those nights he wasn’t at home because of the music. The two had been together for about five years, meeting another fateful winter’s night when she took in Morgan, then a junkie, with no coat, no horn, no prospects. She couldn’t help but embrace him. “I said to myself ‘this little boy, you know.’”
Sympathetic to the musicians, including those who used drugs she never did, Helen opened her apartment to them. “I would let them in because they were people and one thing they were a mystery to me because I could never figure out how anything could make you in the dead winter time, zero weather, take off your coat and sell it.”
She got his horn back, got his coat back, helped him get treatment at a methadone clinic in the Bronx, where they soon moved together into an apartment on the Grand Concourse. She facilitated his rebirth. According to Slug’s owner Jerry Schultz, Helen was to Lee “his everything, his manager, his nurse, his old lady, his mama.” Paul West remarked of Morgan and Helen’s relationship, “His life was restored by Helen. It was a joy to watch. He was playing, he was producing, he was living.”
Morgan, before meeting Helen, had reached rock bottom. He was no longer the ebullient trumpeter of hard bop we see in stills from recording sessions at Blue Note, poignant images depicting the baby-faced exuberance of a teenaged musician, who had a distinct musical style and a penchant for looking clean, “Ivy League” said Wayne Shorter, at all times. Morgan liked fast cars; he smoked, he laughed, and he played the trumpet.
Shorter, then a young musician, coming out of the army, recognized Morgan as a star the first time he saw him play in Dizzy’s band, the one that also featured Melba Liston. Shorter recalls Morgan’s ability to create a musical narrative in a solo. When he listened to him play, Shorter silently urged on Morgan to “Talk to the people; talk to the people, tell them your story.”
Val Wilmer interviewed Morgan in 1971. He explained his artistic vision: “I find that the essence of creativity is the newness of things, and the only way to keep things new is to have constant changes of environment and surrounding and people and all that, you know. And that’s the thing that is so exciting about being a jazz musician.” The last new thing Helen could support was a girlfriend.
Valerie Bishop recalled, as news spread of Morgan’s new girlfriend, that “Nobody knew how [Helen] could endure this guy. He really owed her his life, let alone, at the very least, his respect. But he was just vile to her. He pushed her to the limits and beyond.” But, according to Lee Morgan’s niece, Donna Cox, “It was like Helen was addicted to him. She went everywhere with Lee. She didn’t just go to watch him play from time to time. She went every night and stayed for every set. The only time she wasn’t with him was when he was in the bathroom or something.” His sister-in-law commented that Helen was “Not so much protective. Helen was jealous.”
Helen knew her worth. “Like I made him. You know. I brought you back. You belong to me.” She rejected the idea that he could start “seeing this girl,” leaving her alone at home every night. “I was not one of the nicest persons either. I will not sit here and tell you that I was so nice because I was not. I was one who will cut you. I was sharp. Yeah. I had to be, had to be. I was sharp. And I…I looked out for me.” But Lee Morgan wouldn’t accept the price. “He had somebody (his age) to play with,” recalled Helen.
“Did I love him? Or did I think he was my possession? And I think part of that might have been my fault because I might have stopped being…I might have started being too possessive or too much like a mother to him.” The musicians who witnessed the shooting and were profoundly angered by her actions, still found that they could accept and embrace her afterwards. Bassist Larry Ridley said “The anger just went away” when he later saw her. David Rosenthal sees the shooting as definitely marking the death of hard bop.
After pleading not guilty in April 1972, Helen posted bail in May. In 1973 she pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter. According to Lee’s biographer, Jeffrey McMillan, despite speculation that she’d been sent to a mental institution, exact information about Helen’s sentence is unknown, as her case file had been taken from the County Clerk’s office. She moved back to Wilmington in 1975 and died in 1996. According to her son, Al Harrison, her life in the Methodist church was devotional penance.
Love, heartbreak, forgiveness, redemption: the narrative arc of a jazz life.
#jazzmasculinity #womenwritejazz #jazzandgender #womeninjazz #LeeMorgan
Yes! It’s National Poetry Month!
**Originally published on www.thepickaninnypapers.com.**
You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen, by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Jeffrey Boston Weatherford (New York: Atheneum, 2016)
Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets, by Kwame Alexander with Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth, illustrated by Ekua Holmes (Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2017)
Let’s dive in with poetry for middle grade readers. Each selection warrants repeated readings, as poetry typically does, to ruminate over the themes, the exquisite language, and the outstanding visuals.
Carole Boston Weatherford, poet, and her son, illustrator Jeffery Boston Weatherford, collaborated on the 2016 book, You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen. You can hold the book in one hand, its petite size belying the vastness of the themes captured within. The work pulls you into the 1940s and the historical experience of young black men and women eager to make their mark during an era of upheaval and change.
Weatherford writes of segregation, racism, gender, and patriotism during World War II, through the eyes of an Airman who seized the chance to fight and fly. “You hail from big cities and country roads/and are not run of the mill by any measure./Thirteen men—not thirty-five, as expected—/and not an “average Joe” among you.” Ambitious young men are not the only stars of the book. We learn as well of the bravery of those black women allowed into the Army Nurse Corps because the military faced a shortage of nurses. “You cannot go to war without a medical corps./…It really takes a good nurse to KEEP ‘EM FLYING.” Weatherford doesn’t shy away from the fact that black people were fighting on two fronts, abroad and at home where “In this war, the enemy is you./In 1941 and 1942, eleven black men—/if you count the three boys—/were lynched in the United States.” Black newspapers pressed the point in reportage and editorials; William Henry Hastie, “a freedom fighter,” pressed the military: “How could a black man be expected to fight,/he asks, and defend a country/that doesn’t respect his rights…?” In depicting Dorie Miller’s bravery at Pearl Harbor, boxer Joe Louis’s and songbird Lena Horne’s support of the war effort, Weatherford emphasizes the complexity of African American patriotism. For the Airmen of the Fighting 99th, “The color barrier was granite,/but you not only chipped away at it,/you did victory rolls over the rubble.”
Jeffrey Boston Weatherford’s scratchboard illustrations are like woodcuts from the era. The images are intimate (we see an Airman studying the picture of his girl, other Airmen playing cards and listening to the jukebox) and expansive (the Fighting 99th in flight formation in the sky, a rendering of the bombing of Pearl Harbor); they capture black cultural figures (Horne, Louis) and American segregation.
Check out a discussion between the two here:
http://player.pbs.org/viralplayer/2365927401
As Weatherford shows, we turn to poetry for inspiration, whether to tell a story about the past or, as Kwame Alexander, Chris Colderley, and Marjory Wentworth do, to show how our own art draws on the beauty of others. The book’s title draws on poet Lucille Clifton who understood that “Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.” That wondering is the task Alexander, Colderley, and Wentworth task themselves in Out of Wonder. They embrace the art of twenty other poets, such as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, e. e. Cummings, and Rumi, and create new work inspired by them. As Alexander explains, “I believe that by reading other poets we can discover own wonder…. The poems in this book pay tribute to the poets…by adopting their style, extending their ideas, and offering gratitude to their wisdom and inspiration.” (Brief bios of each of the poets referenced are included for further exploration.)
Each section of the collection has a short introduction covering ideas around style, feeling and theme, and connection. Chris Colderley, in celebrating Nikki Giovanni, writes,
people forget…poetry is not just words on a page…it is…
a snowflake on your tongue…a tattoo on the inside of your arm…a dashiki and a kaftan…
…
poetry is remembering the things that matter…the ones you love…
when night comes softly…like ripples on a pond
That’s why, after your first read of Out of Wonder, you must lay it flat on a table and dive more deeply into Ekua Holmes’s mixed-media collages. (See her work above.) Each poem is illustrated in exuberant colors and textures that spring from the page. Holmes gives us the stillness of nature and the urgency of the city, the playfulness of young children and the blues of adults. She expertly depicts the variety in scope of the poems, teasing out the fullness of the poets’ words in her art.
Kwame Alexander was interviewed on NPR by Rachel Martin about Out of Wonder; check it out here:
Defunding Arts and Culture: Will It Happen?
I’m encouraged by Potter’s measured assessment of the situation. I’ve got a couple of associations to join and Congressmen to write. Now, who has ideas about how to protect the Legal Services Corporation from this budget?
I have no evidence that this disgusting portrait of Donald Trump made from Peeps by Wisconsin artist Cynthia Lund Torroll was federally funded.
My guess is no. But if you live in Trump Nation, and your state or city is not committed to restoring cuts with state and local tax dollars, prepare for cuts to the small cultural institutions and programs that make a huge difference to your community.
It doesn’t surprise me that the first Trump budget proposes to eliminate all federal cultural and public broadcast funding. It’s the same script we have been seeing for almost forty years. First, the amounts of federal money devoted to arts and culture are infinitesimal, particularly when you compare them to the military budget, and can be added or subtracted with no fiscal impact. According to Suzanne Nossel, Director of the PEN American Center (who characterizes this move as “a repudiation…
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Legacies
I came across this post by Neil Gaiman about the need for creative artists to make a will. I agree whole heartedly. The link features a pdf that can be used as a template. Of course, your best bet is to seek legal advice. Among the organizations providing healthcare and housing resources, and union benefits are the Jazz Foundation of America and the Freelancers Union.
Mingusology
“Most people are forced to do things they don’t want to for most of the time, and so they get to the point where they feel they no longer have any choices about anything important, including who they are. We create our own slavery. But I’m going to keep on getting through, and finding out the kind of man I am, through my music. That’s the one place I can be free.”
Charles Mingus Jr.
Nichole Rustin-Paschal 