© -Steven
Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
I could listen to
Dexter Gordon play the tenor saxophone all night.
There was a time
in my life when I often did.
Dexter made a
batch of LP’s for Alfred Lion’s Blue Note label in the 1960s and his playing on
them was a revelation.
His solos on these
recordings were exciting and explosive, his time hard-driving and impeccable
and his sound was big and wide-open.
Dexter’s ideas and
inventions flowed so effusively that I couldn’t keep up with them; I couldn’t
absorb them.
Anything that came
into his mind came out of his horn; effortlessly.
Cascade after
cascade of the hippest phrases simply flowed and flowed and flowed.
Coleman Hawkins,
Lester Young, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane received more public notice,
awards and accolades, but Dexter was right up there with all of them.
When Jazz went to Europe to live, so did Dexter, performing and
hanging out in Paris Copenhagen
By the time of his
triumphant return visits to the Village Vanguard in NYC and Keystone Korner in
San Francisco in the late 1970s, he had become a different player; more laid
back, lyrical and laconic, but still a force to be reckoned with.
Here are a few
thoughts and observation about Dexter from Garry Giddins’ marvelous five-page
essay on him in Visions of Jazz: The First Century [pp.330–335]:
“The King of
Quoters, Dexter Gordon, was himself eminently quotable. In a day not unlike our
own, when purists issue fiats about what is or isn't valid in jazz, Gordon
declared flatly, ‘jazz is an octopus’—it will assimilate anything it can use.
Drawing closer to home, he spoke of his musical lineage: Coleman Hawkins
"was going out farther on the chords, but Lester [Young] leaned to the
pretty notes. He had a way of telling a story with everything he played/'
Young's story was sure, intrepid, daring, erotic, cryptic. A generation of
saxophonists found itself in his music, as an earlier generation had found
itself in Hawkins's rococo virtuosity. …
Gordon's appeal
was to be found not only in his Promethean sound and nonstop invention, his
impregnable authority combined with a steady and knowing wit, but also in a
spirit born in the crucible of jam sessions. He was the most formidable of
battlers, undefeated in numerous contests, and never more engaging than in his
kindred flare-ups with the princely Wardell Gray, a perfect Lestorian foil,
gently lyrical but no less swinging and sure. …
Gordon was an
honest and genuinely original artist of deep and abiding humor and of
tremendous personal charm. He imparted his personal characteristics to his
music—size, radiance, kindness, a genius for discontinuous logic. Consider his
trademark musical quotations—snippets from other songs woven into the songs he
is playing. Some, surely, were calculated. But not all and probably not many,
for they are too subtle and too supple. They fold into his solos like spectral
glimpses of an alternative universe in which all of Tin Pan Alley is one
infinite song. That so many of the quotations seem verbally relevant I
attribute to Gordon's reflexive stream-of-consciousness and prodigious memory
for lyrics. I cannot imagine him planning apposite quotations.”
Bruce Lundvall and
Michael
Cuscuna
collected all of the albums that Dexter made for Blue Note into a six compact
disc, boxed set that includes some omitted tracks along with photographs by
Francis Wolff and selected commentary.
It’s great to have
all of this music by Dexter in a digital format and it provides a convenient
means to sample the music of this Jazz giant if you are not as yet familiar
with it.
In line with Gary
Giddins’ characterization of Dexter as “The King of the Quoters,” Dexter
composed an homage to Lester Young by making a few minor [literally] chord
alterations to “Tickle Toe,” an original composition that Lester made famous
while performing with Count Basie’s Orchestra.
Dexter entitled
his piece “Cheese Cake” and you can listen to his performance of it on the
audio track to the following video on which he is joined by Sonny Clark on
piano, Butch Warren on bass and Billy Higgins on drums.
To experience the
sheer joy and delight of a brilliant Jazz tenor saxophonist “at work,” you
can’t do much better than Dexter’s solos on “Cheese Cake.”
