Sound of Redemption

Sound Of Redemption, The Frank Morgan Story revolves around a concert in tribute to Frank at California’s State Prison, San Quentin, where he was incarcerated for a few years in the 1960’s.

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Frank Morgan, Newsweek. Photograph by David Strick. “The research project is over.” Frank is refering to his extensive, three decade research into failure.

Pictured (from left to right) at the San Quentin concert: James Egan, producer; Ron Carter, bass; Grace Kelly, alto sax; N. C. Heiken, director; Mark Gross, alto sax; Marvin “Smitty” Smith, drums; George Cables, piano; Delfeayo Marsalis, trombone; Michael Connelly, executive producer; photograph by Terrill Lee Lankford.

Rosalinda Kolb at Gallery 552, Oakland, California, 1987. Photograph by Jim Marshall.

Rosalinda Kolb with drawings, Red Hook, Brooklyn, 1989. Photograph by Ching Ming Cheung.

Putting sound to Sound Of Redemption, Rosalinda’s interview.

Film Review: Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story

For all its time spent dwelling in the lower depths, “Sound of Redemption” ultimately fulfills the promise implicit in its title by reporting how Morgan managed — despite a period of backsliding — to rebuild his life and career after leaving prison for the last time in 1985, with no little help from painter Rosalinda Kolb, his companion (and, for a while, his wife) of several years. Once again, however, the viewer is left with profoundly mixed emotions, haunted by questions of what might and should have been. The documentary doesn’t reference it, but the title of Kolb’s 2014 memoir — Leave ‘Em Hungry: A Love Story and Cautionary Tale — may be the definitive description of, to paraphrase Roberto Benigni in Jim Jarmusch’s “Down By Law,” a sad and beautiful life.
--Joe Leydon for Variety 12/18-2015

'Sound of Redemption': A documentary worthy of Frank Morgan's art

"I was a model prisoner," says Morgan in the film. "I seemed to function best when I was in prison." Exactly why Morgan fell so hard for this unfortunate way of life is open to debate, the film exploring an array of possibilities: periodic abandonment by his parents, the pervasive racism of the day and a kind of self-loathing.
"You have to care about yourself," Morgan says in the documentary, "and I didn't think that I was worth very much."
Others did, however. An artist named Rosalinda Kolb married him, suffered through his prison time and helped him launch a post-penitentiary career in the mid-1980s.
Morgan's sensational story and ever-deepening musical gifts made him national news and a late-blooming, emerging jazz star. "We were sitting at the top of the world at that point," Kolb says in the film. "I mean, fame-and-fortune was literally at the door."
I covered Morgan's multiple performances at the Jazz Showcase in the 1990s and thereafter, his work becoming more daring with each visit. But those closest to him knew he was using drugs again, they say in the film. Kolb divorced him, and Morgan suffered a stroke in 1998, then rebounded, soon performing once again to considerable plaudits. The last time I heard him, in 2005, he was at a creative pinnacle.
-Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune, 8/18/2016