Of Consequence
Lee Morgan, all the girls you've loved before, & a book on Hard Bop
Lee Morgan’s murder was the result of a very straightforward lovers’ quarrel. He’d taken a mistress and brought her out with him when his wife, Helen, showed up a Slugs’, the club he was headlining, unexpectedly and during a blizzard. He dismissed her, continued to flaunt and tend to his mistress, and sent his surprise guest out into the dense snow when she protested. She returned and shot him in the heart with his own gun. The book on hard bop below begins with this scene. I’ve just started reading it. Just in time to be thinking too much about hip hop’s long list of homicides in the wake of the Diddy trial. Lee Morgan’s death is an isolated example of instantaneous retaliation by a woman whose musician husband does what almost every musician of his stature has, lives a double and triple life acting like a Casanova while needing a caretaker in the home to keep his paperwork in order but remain tactful and invisible so he can galavant after hours with novelty women.
Having attended Diddy’s trial and scoured the transcripts, all I can think is, it’s shocking that this style of retribution isn’t inflicted more often. Instead, women disappear or lose their grasps on their egos and surrender their dreams to heartache and domestic work, waiting for a man like Lee Morgan to outgrow his charm so they can be his servant in peace. The author of Hard Bop suggests that the sound dissipated with him, as if the gritty insolence that had inspired it had been assassinated, defeated that freezing night at Slugs’. Without committing murder, I do think women should be more severe in their reactions to rote abuses from industry men, that leaving should be more common than valorizing mistreatment is. The Baraka clip below is from a couple of years before Lee was killed. His speaking style is not unlike hard bop in its blunt, confrontational assertions. He warns of the dangers of allowing your energy to power another’s enterprise. No one warned the damsels of hip hip of this, that this music would not exist without their often overly-enthusiastic complicity in its marketing tricks, and that a better music might spring up if they refused to sell or marginalize their appeal to gimmicks and defunct traditions. Amiri declares here: The white boy controls the world because the muscle in his arm is a strong, unconscious nigga. I’ll add, men control and hazard the world because the music in their hearts is a beautiful, broken woman. I’m eager to read this history of hard bop knowing that the sub-genre collapsed under the weight of a woman’s rage. She regretted her impulsive crime, cried over her husband’s dead body, vanished from the bandstand, a ladylike Machiavelli, left alone.
