Lifesaving Sounds

By JAY COCKS

It's a sort of benediction. Or perhaps just a simple acknowledgment. "I would first like to thank you, the listener, for saving my life," he says after the music's over. "And I would like you to accept these notes, these true feelings, in peace . . ."

Good thing that coda, which is titled Gratitude, comes at the end of Frank Morgan's album Mood Indigo. Hearing it first and taking it at face value, casual listeners might figure they were in for an overdose of New Age good vibes and reach for the off button. That would mean missing out on some elegant alto sax, the kind of jazzmanship that combines the hip and the heartfelt in an accessible, up-to-the-minute sound.

Frank Morgan is 56, and his time has finally rolled around. For a long while there, time looked as if it would roll right over him. He has lived out the sad stereotype of the jazzman's life: near genius, full junkie, part-time thief, full-time con. He spent most of the years between 1954 and 1985 behind bars. Not that he always minded. At San Quentin he was co-leader, with Art Pepper, of the warden's band. There was always a way -- an easy way -- to score whatever he wanted, from alcohol to cocaine. Most of all, as Morgan now recognizes, prison gave him a way to lie low, to hide from himself and the demands of his gift. There was always someone around, he recalls, who could say, "If they didn't keep you locked up all the time, you could have been the greatest in the world."

He can't lie low anymore. Mood Indigo has been on the Billboard jazz chart for the past 15 weeks and is currently perched at No. 5. Lyrical in mood, it recalls John Coltrane's great 1962 Ballads album as it rephrases hardy perennials by Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington and Coltrane (with an assist on two tracks from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis). Although Morgan was tutored in the dizzying strictures of bebop by Charlie Parker, his recent playing has become less slashing, his tone more glowing, his lines more feelingly supple. The new sound is certainly enticing, and has helped Morgan get some of the attention he dodged for so long. Last week he was a guest on Jane Pauley's first prime- time special, about people who have dramatically changed their lives. This week he plays at Kimball's in San Francisco, next week at Birdland in New York City.

Born in Minneapolis to a jazz-guitarist father and a 14-year-old mother, Morgan was playing club dates in Los Angeles when he was still a teenager. He'd back up Billie Holliday or Josephine Baker at night, then go to high school during the day. By 17, he had himself a heroin habit. He received a stern lecture on the evils of using hard drugs from the Yardbird, who undercut his position by promptly sampling Morgan's stash. "Like it or no," Morgan says, "what he was saying was not nearly as loud as what he was doing."

Morgan will say one thing for drugs, though: "They'll help you to do anything in the way of failure, if you want that." He doesn't, not now. At the moment, Morgan seems to have got himself pretty well together. He's been on a methadone program for more than four years, and he's married to painter Rosalinda Kolb, with whom he shares a plant-laden house in Brooklyn's Red Hook section. Of all his recording plans, he is most enthusiastic about the possibility of playing with "a larger ensemble, with strings, maybe the New / York Philharmonic." No wonder he can get away with that kind of Gratitude. Hear his voice break a little as he speaks, and you know that, against heavy odds, he has made himself a lot to be grateful for.

With reporting by Kathryn Jackson Fallon/New York