Henry Hung, trumpet
Scott Foster, guitar
Eric Markowitz, bass
Omar Aran, drums

The Scott Foster Quartet
plays the music of
Lee Morgan! 

Lee Morgan was one of the top jazz trumpet stars of the late 1950s and 1960s, recording prolifically on Blue Note and other labels –featured on John Coltrane’s “Blue Trane” (1957) and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Moanin'” (1959) and scoring a huge hit as a leader with his Blue Note LP,  “The Sidewinder” (1963). His Jazz Messengers run produced 24 albums, and he recorded 17 albums as a leader after “The Sidewinder” made his name common parlance.

At the break between sets this Friday evening and later following the second set, you’ll meet and hear from jazz scholarm dj and writer Larry Reni Thomas, who contributed substantially to the current  hit film documentary “I Called Him Morgan.” Larry wrote the book “The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan” based on his interviews with Helen Morgan, the lady who shot him.  Morgan was shot dead by Helen Morgan, his wife, between sets at a club called Slugs in New York City in 1972. After the music, Thomas will talk about how he came to know and interview Helen Morgan just before her death, and will discuss Morgan music, his murder and the movie.

Kenneth Turan, in his Los Angeles Times review of the documentary, says, “The film’s centerpiece interview is an arresting one-of-a-kind narrative that Helen Morgan herself recorded on a cassette-tape recorder a month before she died. Speaking with writer and teacher Larry Reni Thomas, she details her difficult life, her relationship with Morgan and how and why she came to shoot him at a Manhattan jazz club named Slugs in the midst of a blizzard so terrible that it delayed ambulances, contributing to her husband’s death.”

The film played to sold out crowds in an extended run last spring at the Roxie Theater.

From Bird & Beckett, Larry travels to the Monterey Jazz Festival, where he’ll engaged in conversation with jazz writer Ashley Kahn in a discussion following a screening of the documentary on Saturday the 16th.