Snowflakes Falling on Manhattan

I’ll confess something to you.  I have never watched anything on Netflix.  I have never sat down and said: “why don’t I watch this . . . on Netflix.”  I have never had Netflix in all my years.   When I was off in Beijing last time I decided to listen to Lee Morgan's “Search for the New Land.”  It prompted me to look online for a way to view the Lee Morgan documentary, "I Called Him Morgan" on Youtube or some other online venue.  You don’t get any more than the trailer or two.  One of those trailer clips simply plays the opening of “Search for the New Land” with snowflakes falling on Manhattan in unison with Grant Green’s high neck double taps. 

Oddly I was up late.  Oddly the Mrs. was not in here watching something I had no interest in watching.  It took a while.  But eventually I mastered the text entry function on the remote and before long I’d found and was watching those very snowflakes fall over the lower east side and it felt and it continued to feel, for most of the film like the New York 1972 of my six year-old memory bank. 

Oddly it is his common law wife Hellen who has the narrative voice.  Lee only peppers the progression with commentary from on stage or celebratory brass from throughout his career.  Helen drives the story.  Her voice was captured on a cassette, by a jazz aficionado there in North Carolina where she'd resettled to, who realized the profundity of whom he had met and had the presence of mind to do something about it.  Her story starts in the south and we are immediately empathic to her desire to leave the country, when she states that she was first pregnant at thirteen and that she had her second child a year later.

Quietly we root for Helen, just like we root for Lee. Even though we know that their union is headed for a washed-out bridge.   She cooks.  He’s hungry.  She has a son his age.  He needs a mother, as much as anything.  The grainy footage of the George Washington Bridge and Grand Concourse in the Bronx, and the Lower East Side all feel much closer than they should.  It is never clear if this footage is vintage or made to look vintage but regardless, I feel like I’m staring out the back of a car into my six-year-old world. 

The most telling moment for Lee may have been when he showed up in slippers to play in the band and tried to shake it off, like: “yeah, so what?  I’m in slippers” when everybody knew he must have pawned his shoes for smack.  The most telling moment for Helen, was not the remarkable encounter she shares with Miles, “Nasty, nasty.”  It was when she says there was another woman and the camera just holds the view out from the Bronx apartment, eerily.   And the most remarkable scene of all was when the bassist Larry Ridley, if memory serves, talks about how much anger he had towards Hellen.  How he had kept it inside for four years while she was in jail for murdering his friend. But at the moment they met and she approached him and opened her arms and said “I’m so sorry” and he mentioned that suddenly all the anger evaporated as he hugged there between sets.

Friday, 12/13/19