zumpoems

A Fifty-year Friday feature on Dexter Gordon! Now we’re talkin’! I read this, of course, when it was first posted a couple of weeks ago, and it immediately dredged up some long dormant memories. I should have dashed off some remarks then, while I was transported to my misspent youth by the Curator’s discussion on not one but two Gordon albums from half a century ago. (The 6-foot 6-inch Gordon was sometimes known as the “Sophisticated Giant”—perhaps the Curator misread that and thought they were obscure Gentle Giant records.) Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Life intervened, so here I am writing on this June post as the calendar turns to July. So sue me.

I had encountered Gordon occasionally on the old KBCA FM radio station in LA that played jazz 24/7. (Yes, kiddies, there once was a golden time, long, long ago, when Los Angeles could support a commercial all-jazz radio station. Shortly after I decamped SoCal for grad school on the East Coast, KBCA changed its call letters to KKGO and transitioned to the trendier, presumably more lucrative “smooth jazz” format. It was a slippery slope—last I heard what was once KBCA had become a country-western station, which to a jazz fan is like hearing that an old friend and mentor you looked up to has deteriorated into an alcoholic guttersnipe who frequents the downtown missions for free meals.)  But, relocated to Washington, DC, I had a chance to see him live at the venerable Blues Alley jazz club in Georgetown. It was, I think, around November 1979—which would have been the beginning of my second year of grad school—that I saw him in the cozy Blues Alley venue. It may have been my first visit to Blues Alley. Gordon was playing with his quartet, which at that time I think included George Cables, Rufus Reid, and Eddie Gladden. Sadly my all-too-fallible memory can no longer extract from the dim mists of time just what pieces Gordon played that night. (A good guess would be the set included such familiar tunes as “Autumn Leaves,” “Body and Soul,”  “’Round Midnight,” and other such standards that were part of his repertoire in the late ‘70s.) Whatever Gordon played, though, I remember I was impressed. And that I remember because after the set let out—it was either a Friday or a Saturday night—I made my way up Wisconsin Avenue to Ollsen’s Records & Books, of which I was most definitely an habitué, and purchased Gordon’s Manhattan Symphonie on cassette tape. I had heard that deep, distinctive Gordon saxophone performance and needed to take some home—a musical doggie bag, as it were.

Manhattan Symphonie had been released the previous year, and featured Gordon’s American quartet at that time, the aforementioned Cables, Reid, and Gladden. If you’re looking for an introduction to Gordon’s music and his style, Manhattan Symphonie is a good place to start. It includes two polished, trademark ballads—“As Time Goes By” and Monk’s classic “Ruby My Dear.”   There’s an energetic cover of Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice” and an extended, somewhat up-tempo version of “Body and Soul.”    As excellent as all those are, what stands out as my favorite is Gordon’s cover of the Donald Byrd tune “Tanya.”  Shorter than the 18-minute version that takes up all of side one of Gordon’s 1964 LP One Flight Up, this version of Tanya is sultry, smoky, and undulates like an accomplished stripper. Manhattan Symphonie was one of those albums you would put on to try to impress a girl—straight-ahead, melodic, sophisticated without being edgy. She just might get drawn in by the ballads, whereas dropping the needle on Mingus Ah Um, or even Coltrane’s Giant Steps, would have her looking at her watch and remarking on how late it was.

I would be remiss if I did not add my praise to that of the Curator to the movie “’Round Midnight” and Gordon’s performance. Like the Curator, I saw the movie away from home and found it excellent. It mines the biographies of Lester Young and Bud Powell for its plot and  themes, and it features a solid soundtrack by Herbie Hancock. It is, I think, a better movie than the latter, and rather depressing Bird, Clint Eastwood’s biopic of Charlie Parker.  But, I am rambling now, as old men are wont to do, down mental rabbit holes of interest to no one but themselves. Time to stop—but also to thank the Curator for helping me recall the time I saw Dexter Gordon at Blues Alley. The seventies were an insipid decade—but if you looked hard enough, it had its moments.

                                                — Leo the Deacon

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