How a jazz legend’s resting place was lost and found, 50 years after his tragic death: Photos, Video

Lee Morgan’s final resting place is a hillside plot in a modest cemetery in Bucks County, brushing up against the Pennsylvania Turnpike. On a recent afternoon, the winter sun cast stark shadows across his grave marker, which has a trumpet engraved beneath his name, EDW. LEE MORGAN, and the years 1938 to 1972 — the measure of a life cut tragically short.

Morgan was a hard-bop trumpeter of spectacular prowess and undeniable charisma, with a discography that spans some of the most iconic Blue Note albums of the 1960s. He’s also one of jazz’s most infamous casualties, due to the circumstances of his death almost exactly 50 years ago, on Feb. 19, 1972. Morgan was playing a gig at the East Village club Slugs’ Saloon. Between sets early Saturday morning, he had an altercation with his common-law wife, Helen, who shot him. A snowstorm delayed the arrival of medical help, and Morgan bled to death from his injury.

This story received a powerful and sensitive treatment in the 2016 documentary I Called Him Morgan, by Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin. Now streaming on Netflix, it’s an empathetic portrait of both Lee and Helen Morgan, and a clear-eyed view on their relationship, which helped pull him back from the depths of a serious heroin addiction. Rather than a conventional documentary arc, it conjures an aura of reminiscence and conjecture; among its subtexts is a wistful notion of what the world lost with Morgan’s shocking departure.

Last year, haunted in part by that feeling, a jazz fan named Tommy Maguire went out in search of Morgan’s grave, which he had learned was a short drive from his house in the Philadelphia suburbs. Maguire had gathered some information about the precise location of the plot, but as he walked around the White Chapel Memorial Park Cemetery, he couldn’t find it. He made a couple of repeat visits, still to no avail. Then, just after Christmas, he returned and managed to enlist the help of a groundskeeper, who shared in his puzzlement, studying a map that showed where the grave should be. After plunging a spade into a few rugged spots along the hillside, they heard a muffled clang. A half-hour or so of determined digging uncovered the grave marker that Lee shares with his father, Otto Morgan. It had somehow been swallowed by nearly a foot of earth.

“There was no snow in the forecast,” he mused. “And, you know, had the snowstorm not hit New York that night, the ambulance could have probably saved him. The turnpike is here next to us, and it sort of sounds like a river from time to time, with the traffic. And I just stood here with this dude with a big crowbar thing in the soft snow, looking at the letters of this unearthed grave marker that was still 10 inches or so underneath the soil. It was dramatic, and it was really sad.”

As we approach the 50th anniversary of his passing, there are other efforts underway to honor the fullness of Morgan’s legacy. A place-based public history project called All That Philly Jazz, run by Faye Anderson, has been working on securing a Pennsylvania historical marker for Morgan in Center City Philadelphia; she plans to submit the nomination packet this Friday. On Saturday, Anderson says, she will make her first pilgrimage to the White Chapel Memorial Park Cemetery with some members of Morgan’s family, including a nephew, Raymond Darryl Cox.

“I did tell him to bring a broom and a shovel and gloves, just in case,” Anderson says. Thanks to the tenacious efforts of a curious fan, that won’t be necessary — not this weekend, and probably never again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwI-7LvK3OE