Word: morgan
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...FRANK MORGAN: MOOD INDIGO (Antilles). Once touted as Charlie Parker's heir apparent, alto saxman Frank Morgan seemingly blew it all on a life of hard drugs, thievery and frequent jail terms. Released from prison in 1985, Morgan, now 56, launched a storybook comeback -- of which this outstanding album is the latest chapter. Ably joined on two tracks by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Morgan's soulful, driving sax proves that for a battle-scarred jazz veteran, playing well is the best revenge...
There were few black faces on the big screen back in the 1940s, when young Morgan Freeman collected soda bottles to pay his way into the local movie matinee. And the one or two who did appear made the young moviegoer squirm. He did not object to their playing servants, jobs his own parents had occasionally held, but it bothered him that these celluloid domestics were presented as empty caricatures, devoid of human dignity. "I didn't know anybody who acted like that," recalls Freeman...
...cold, overcast afternoon of Dec. 16, federal appeals court Judge Robert Vance received a package at his white-columned house in Mountain Brook, Ala., a Birmingham suburb. The return address indicated that the parcel had been mailed by Vance's old friend Senior Judge Lewis R. Morgan, who knew of Vance's passion for animals. "I guess Judge Morgan sent me some more of those horse magazines," Vance told his wife Helen. But as Vance eagerly opened the shoe box-size parcel, it exploded. Vance was killed instantly; his wife was seriously injured...
Such a metaphor is available in Driving Miss Daisy. If you look hard, you can find in this account of the 25-year relationship between Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy), a genteel Southern, Jewish matriarch, and her black chauffeur, Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman), a microcosmic study of changing racial attitudes in a crucial time and place (Atlanta, circa 1948-73). What you will not find in this marvelously understated movie is overtly inspirational comments on that subject, broad sentimentality or the slightest pomposity about its own mission. In other words, Alfred Uhry's adaptation of his Pulitzer-prizewinning play aspires more...
Kevin Jarre's script makes no direct comment on these matters, and a squad of fine actors ground the film in felt reality: Denzel Washington is a proud and badly misused troublemaker; Driving Miss Daisy's Morgan Freeman a steadying influence; Andre Braugher a Harvard student who finds Emersonian idealism of small help in mastering the bayonet. It is the movie's often awesome imagery and a bravely soaring choral score by James Horner that transfigure the reality, granting it the status of necessary myth. Broad, bold, blunt, Glory is everything that a film like Miss Daisy, all nuance...