Frank Morgan Memorial

When I consider all of Man's arts, crafts, and sciences, I am convinced that the most impressive and unique human achievements are in the worldly microcosm of sound--words, and how they are used, and especially music. I think that music best represents fulfillment of the pure ambition of human art for expression. The abstraction music can provide for human experience needs little explanation and can abide it less.

If some human voices approach the purity of tone and facility of note-playing that instruments provide, some instruments seem designed to express musical tones and emotional expression that could come from human voices--without words, of course (Peter Frampton notwithstanding). That seemed to me to be the kind of beauty that Frank Morgan could bring with his saxophone.

Frank knew what he had, and he respected his talent and demanded respect--for that artistic ideal, I feel--when he played. His jazz was not background music for chit-chat and party dialogue: he wouldn't let it be so. My evidence for that was his willingness to tell his audience in so many words to be quiet when he played.

At the Remembrance event today at the Taos Inn, I watched but didn't speak up. I didn't have the incredible stories to tell that most of them had, none at least that were unique or humorous. What I had seen of him was only his public persona: warm, stylish, flirtatious with the ladies, and mild-mannered and dignified with the gentlemen. There was more, I knew, but I didn't know so much--about his health problems, about his history of addiction (though I knew of it), about his time in prison. I hadn't been hip to his talent or his career in the '80's--a time when I was living in New York and going to the jazz clubs--though he was visiting and playing there some of the time.

I can testify to his generosity in putting his talent out there for the people of Taos. He played beautifully at my mother-in-law's wake (no fee, far as I know), including a sweet bit when he made the strings of the grand piano in the room vibrate to his tones. He came to the ski valley to play to our group for the Yaxche Mountain Festival, sending his sounds resonating off the nearby rock faces for our enjoyment.

I don't know about the rest of it, but in his later life, he seemed a fulfilled person, happy to be sharing his gifts. He left us something real and permanent in the enduring dialogue between human voice and musical instrument.