I Called Him Morgan (2016) on Netflix

NR20161h 31mDocumentary History Music

A documentary portrait of the jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan and Helen, his common-law wife. Fellow musicians recall the New York jazz world the two lived in and the music Morgan made.

Netflix4.2/5
IMDb7.3/102,064 votes
Rotten Tomatoes96%

Trailer

Plot summary

Archival footage, photographs and interviews with musicians carry the story of the trumpeter Lee Morgan and Helen, his common-law wife. Helen grew up in rural North Carolina, gave birth twice before the age of fourteen and left her children in the South for New York City. She housed and fed Morgan, bought back the trumpet he had pawned and found him work when others would not hire him. A teacher recorded a cassette interview with her in 1996.

Cast

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about I Called Him Morgan (2016)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

I Called Him Morgan's story-within-a-story starts with a 2013 interview with Larry Reni Thomas, a North Carolina teacher and jazz DJ who recognized his adult-education pupil, nearing 70, as Helen Morgan, Lee Morgan's widow; he had taped her in 1996, a month before she died.
Helen Morgan rescued Lee Morgan from a rock-bottom heroin addiction: she clothed, fed and housed him, and bought back the trumpet he had pawned for drug money.
SPOILER
Helen Morgan shot Lee Morgan at Slug's, a Manhattan jazz club, during a blizzard so terrible that it delayed the ambulances, contributing to her husband's death.
I Called Him Morgan was produced over seven years, from 2009 to 2016, and its editing alone took three of them.
Despite being called the best reviewed Swedish-produced film in the US since Fanny and Alexander, I Called Him Morgan received no nominations at the 2018 Swedish Guldbaggen Awards, which left Swedish film writers asking what happened.