When Dexter Gordon signed with Blue Note in 1961, he could record in New York but could not work there. He had lost the cabaret card that let a musician play where liquor was served, so at first he commuted from Los Angeles to make records. When he got the card back and took up residence, the Jazz Gallery booked him for his first New York appearance in twelve years. The records he made for Alfred Lion in those months, Doin' Allright and Dexter Calling in May 1961, then Go and A Swingin' Affair in August 1962, are the sound of a man getting his career back.
The usual account says the 1950s simply swallowed him. The facts are less tidy. Heroin and the law took most of the decade: he was held at Chino from 1953 to 1955, and for the rest of the fifties he was in and out of prison until his final release from Folsom in 1959. In between he still worked. In 1955 he recorded Daddy Plays the Horn for Bethlehem and Dexter Blows Hot and Cool for Dootone. In 1960 he replaced Jackie McLean in the Los Angeles production of Jack Gelber's play The Connection, playing Freddie Redd's score and adding two tunes of his own, and that year he cut The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon for Jazzland. What he lost was a national career, steady recording, and New York.
He had once had all three. Gordon was born in Los Angeles on February 27, 1923, the son of one of the first Black doctors in the city, whose patients included Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton. He played in Hampton's saxophone section from the end of 1940 into 1943, then with Fletcher Henderson and Louis Armstrong, and in 1944 he joined Billy Eckstine's band, the big band where bebop was being worked out in public. On "Blowin' the Blues Away" he and Gene Ammons share the tenor solos, a two-tenor duel that set the pattern for the battles Ammons later fought with Sonny Stitt. Some writers call Gordon the first bebop tenor player. Both John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins learned from him, and on the Blue Note records you can hear him taking some of their ideas back.
The session for Go took place on August 27, 1962, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with Lion producing. The band was a Blue Note house rhythm section. Sonny Clark, born in Herminie, Pennsylvania, in 1931, was one of the label's regular pianists. Butch Warren, born in Washington in August 1939, was 23 and had been hired by Lion as the staff bassist; his first Blue Note date was Clark's Leapin' and Lopin' in 1961, and in 1962 he also played on Herbie Hancock's Takin' Off. Billy Higgins, born in Los Angeles in 1936, had played on Ornette Coleman's first records in 1958 and was on his way to more than 700 recording dates. Gordon and Higgins were both Los Angeles natives, thirteen years apart.
The session sheet at jazzdisco.org gives the order of work, and it is not the order of the album. The quartet started with "Three O'Clock in the Morning" (take 3), then "Second Balcony Jump" (take 4), "Where Are You" (take 6), "Cheese Cake" (take 8), "I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" (take 12) and "Love for Sale" (take 13). Six tunes and a highest take number of 13 point to a band that needed very few attempts. When the record was sequenced, the tune cut last in the first half of the day, Gordon's own "Cheese Cake," went to the front, and the first thing recorded became the last thing heard.
"Cheese Cake" runs six and a half minutes. The theme is a simple line, and once it is stated Gordon settles into the kind of solo he built his reputation on: a very large sound, phrases placed behind the beat, and the occasional quotation from some other song dropped in at the right moment. Quoting was a hallmark of his playing, and he did it often enough that listeners began waiting for it. Clark comps lightly underneath, Warren walks, and Higgins keeps his ride cymbal moving so evenly that the tempo never sounds forced.
The two ballads show the other half of his gift. "I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" is a Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn song, and "Where Are You?" is by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson, from 1937. On both Gordon takes his time, holds notes at the ends of phrases, and plays the melody close enough that you could sing the words along with him. He was a tall man with a big sound, and on a slow tune he used that size to make the song feel spacious rather than heavy. Clark is especially good here, keeping his fills short and his chords soft.
"Second Balcony Jump" is credited to Billy Eckstine and Gerald Valentine. Earl Hines's orchestra, with Eckstine as its singer, recorded it at Victor's studio in New York on March 19, 1942, and Bluebird issued it as B-11567. Gordon was not in that band, but two years later he was in Eckstine's own, so the tune came from his circle. Cole Porter's "Love for Sale" gets the longest performance on the record, over seven and a half minutes. "Three O'Clock in the Morning," an old waltz by Julián Robledo with words by Dorothy Terriss, is an odd choice for a hard bop date, and it closes the album in a mood of good humor.
Ira Gitler wrote the original liner notes, and he caught the feel of the date in a sentence that has been quoted ever since: "Everyone was really together, in all the most positive meanings of that word." He also wrote that the session was not recorded in a nightclub but matched the relaxed atmosphere of the best records made that way, and that is the right way to hear it, since nobody on the date is pressing. Blue Note released Go as BLP 4112 in mono and BST 84112 in stereo before the end of 1962, with Wikipedia giving the third week of December and Discogs listing November.
Two days after Go, on August 29, the same four men were back at Van Gelder's and recorded A Swingin' Affair. Blue Note held it until early October 1964. Wikipedia describes Go as Gordon's expressed favorite of the two, though I have not found that in a dated interview, so I take it as the label's account more than his.
Soon after the second session, Gordon left the country. Offers came from England and then from the Continent. He took a residency at Ronnie Scott's club in London, and while he was there an American pianist living in Copenhagen helped arrange bookings at the Jazzhus Montmartre, which began his long attachment to that city. The trip turned into a fourteen-year stay in Europe. He came home for good in 1976, and his engagement at the Village Vanguard, released by Columbia as Homecoming, became one of the big jazz stories of the decade. Go belongs to the earlier return, the one that put him back on records in New York.
For Sonny Clark there was no second chapter. He died in New York on January 13, 1963, less than five months after these sessions, at 31. The official cause was a heart attack, and the likely cause was a heroin overdose. After his death Thelonious Monk hired Butch Warren, who stayed for about a year and later left music for long stretches. Listening to how relaxed and inventive Clark sounds on Go, it is hard not to think about how little time he had left.
Blue Note has kept the record in print almost continuously, from the 1962 mono and stereo issues through a 1985 CD and a 1997 vinyl edition, along with many later pressings. You do not need an original to hear what this quartet did.
Go is a weekend record for me, on a slow afternoon with a glass of wine. Side one is the usual choice: "Cheese Cake" into the first ballad into "Second Balcony Jump." I go back and forth on whether this or A Swingin' Affair is the better date, and I keep landing on Go, because the songs are better and so are the ballads. Still, the two belong together. Same band, same studio, two days apart, they are as close as a record collection gets to being in the room on consecutive nights.