Frank Morgan, Master of Bebop Sax, Dies at 73

Frank Morgan, a jazz saxophonist whose promising career was derailed by drug problems in the 1950s but whose triumphant comeback 30 years later led to an unexpected taste of midlife stardom, died on Friday in Minneapolis. He was 73.

The cause was colon cancer, said his agent, Reggie Marshall. He had battled other health problems in recent years, including a stroke and kidney failure.

Mr. Morgan was heralded as one of the rising stars of the Los Angeles jazz scene when he was barely out of his teens. He worked with Lionel Hampton and recorded with the drummer Kenny Clarke and others. But it would take him decades to achieve the fame many predicted for him, primarily for reasons that had nothing to do with music.

He had taken up the alto saxophone at a young age after hearing Charlie Parker, a master of that instrument and one of the architects of bebop. So all-consuming was his admiration for Parker that he emulated not just the musical approach for which Parker was celebrated but also the heroin habit for which he was notorious.

“I thought the heroin and the bebop and the whole lifestyle thing went together,” he told the jazz critic Gary Giddins in 1986. “I thought that one used heroin to play like Charlie Parker played.”

By the time Mr. Morgan recorded his first album in 1955 — coincidentally the year Parker died — he had already spent time in prison. Over the next three decades he was in more than he was out, serving time for robbery as well as drug possession. He did not record another album as a leader until 1985.

That album, “Easy Living,” the first of seven he recorded for the California jazz label Contemporary, earned laudatory reviews and jump-started his career. In 1986 he played a week at the Village Vanguard, to still more acclaim; it was his first New York nightclub engagement.

Mr. Morgan became a leading figure in the jazz revival of the late ’80s, a living reminder of bebop’s durability. He worked regularly and recorded prolifically over the next decade for the Contemporary, Antilles and Telarc labels. Robert Palmer of The New York Times, reviewing a return engagement at the Vanguard in 1987, wrote, “Jazz just doesn’t come any better.”

Frank Morgan was born in Minneapolis on Dec. 23, 1933, and was exposed to jazz as a child by his father, Stanley, a professional guitarist. He grew up in Minneapolis and Milwaukee and in 1947, after his parents divorced, moved to Los Angeles to live with his father. He won a talent contest there at 15 and was soon working regularly on the city’s thriving Central Avenue nightclub circuit.

Mr. Morgan suffered a stroke in 1998, but he was back on the road and in the studio within a few months and resumed recording, for the HighNote label, in 2004. After living in New Mexico for many years, he moved back to Minneapolis in 2005 and reduced his workload, although he continued to perform occasionally. He had just returned from a European tour when he learned he had cancer last month.