I Called Him Morgan

Ultimately, Collin’s film is one of forgiveness. That’s not the usual way great tragedies end.

The backbone of Collin’s film is the sole audio interview with Helen Morgan, made in 1996, shortly before her death. The story that she tells combines with the story that Collin builds around it to provide a revelatory and moving portrait of a great musician.

It’s fitting that Kasper Collin’s excellent documentary I Called Him Morgan, a sleek, sorrowful elegy for the prodigiously gifted, tragically slain bop trumpeter Lee Morgan, is as much a visual and textural triumph as it is a gripping feat of reportage.

Collin attempts to do more than recount facts; if he can’t always wholly capture the figures at the film’s centre, he can convey a sense of the time and place that Lee and Helen inhabited.

This is not a lurid true-crime tale of jealousy and drug addiction, but a delicate human drama about love, ambition and the glories of music.

I Called Him Morgan evokes times and places, and the sorrows and joys of the jazz life in those times and places, with real integrity.

The documentary I Called Him Morgan, which charts his brief life and career, offers classic tunes and a vivid history of the New York jazz scene, while never quite managing to sell the drama inherent to its tale.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]