How a jazz legend's resting place was lost and found, 50 years after his tragic death

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/16/ [login to see] /lee-morgan-50th-anniversary-death-gravesite
Lee Morgan's final resting place is a hillside plot in a modest cemetery in Bucks County, brushing up against the Pennsylvania Turnpike. On a recent afternoon, the winter sun cast stark shadows across his grave marker, which has a trumpet engraved beneath his name, EDW. LEE MORGAN, and the years 1938 to 1972 — the measure of a life cut tragically short.

Morgan was a hard-bop trumpeter of spectacular prowess and undeniable charisma, with a discography that spans some of the most iconic Blue Note albums of the 1960s. He's also one of jazz's most infamous casualties, due to the circumstances of his death almost exactly 50 years ago, on Feb. 19, 1972. Morgan was playing a gig at the East Village club Slugs' Saloon. Between sets early Saturday morning, he had an altercation with his common-law wife, Helen, who shot him. A snowstorm delayed the arrival of medical help, and Morgan bled to death from his injury.

This story received a powerful and sensitive treatment in the 2016 documentary I Called Him Morgan, by Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin. Now streaming on Netflix, it's an empathetic portrait of both Lee and Helen Morgan, and a clear-eyed view on their relationship, which helped pull him back from the depths of a serious heroin addiction. Rather than a conventional documentary arc, it conjures an aura of reminiscence and conjecture; among its subtexts is a wistful notion of what the world lost with Morgan's shocking departure.