Dexter Gordon

Gordon's lost decade fits in one line. Between 1953 and 1959 he turns up on record three times, twice as a leader, and this is one of them. Two days in Los Angeles, November 11 and 12, 1955, for Dootsie Williams's Dootone label, a rhythm and blues outfit rather than a jazz house. No source names the studio, only the city. Carl Perkins is on piano, Leroy Vinnegar on bass, Chuck Thompson on drums, and Gordon thanks his host the cheapest way available: a tune called "Blowin' for Dootsie."

Jimmy Robinson takes the trumpet chair, and how much of it he takes depends on who you ask. Wikipedia and Discogs list him with no qualifier. jazzdisco marks him on three titles only, "Silver Plated," "Rhythm Mad" and "Bonna Rue," which would leave the other six as quartet performances. Read that as a refinement rather than a settled fact. Robinson is otherwise undocumented, and Fresh Sound calls him Jim. Billboard in February 1956 heard Gordon as somewhat mellowed, with a quiet authority in a forthright, simply tailored style.

The first pressing is red translucent vinyl with maroon deep-groove labels, and later runs went to plain black. Discogs logs about ninety copies against 573 wants with a median sale near two hundred dollars, so the red one is a real find and priced like it. The label misprints the opener as "Sliver Plated," faithfully transcribed on that first pressing. The catalog number is DL-207. Fresh Sound's reissue page prints DTL-207, which looks like a slip, since DTL was the prefix Dootone used elsewhere.

Rating this honestly means separating the playing from the occasion. Perkins is the standout after Gordon, and Billboard's man flagged him too, calling him a newcomer full of ideas. But it is a small label date with thin documentation and no ambition past getting a good tenor player onto tape, and you can hear a career on hold around the edges of it. Start here anyway, because the next record on this page is six years later, and the distance between the two is the whole story.

Six years off, then May 6, 1961 at Van Gelder's in Englewood Cliffs, Alfred Lion producing, with Freddie Hubbard, Horace Parlan, George Tucker and Al Harewood. His Blue Note debut as a leader, and the record that reopened everything after most of the 1950s went to addiction and legal trouble. Ira Gitler's original notes read better now than they can have read then. He wrote that Gordon's presence had not been felt directly on the scene in a long time, and that the sixties looked like a decade of new promise for him.

The tone that comes back is heavier and slower to commit than the Dootone date. Gordon uses Hubbard the way a veteran uses a young trumpet player, letting the kid go first and then answering at half the speed, and Parlan's left hand does a lot of quiet work underneath both of them. One title note before you shop. The jacket reads Doin' Allright as one word, while the Gershwin tune that opens it is "I Was Doing All Right," spelled the ordinary way. Blue Note's own store drops the apostrophe, which is the store's typo and not the jacket's.

The original LP is five tracks. "I Want More" was attempted here as take ten and shelved, then re-cut three days later at the quartet date and issued on Dexter Calling instead. The 1988 CD puts it back along with an alternate "For Regulars Only," and neither one is on any vinyl original, so there is no seven-track pressing to hunt for. Reid Miles designed the cover, Francis Wolff shot the photograph, Gitler wrote the notes, Plastylite pressed the mono.

One trap on the collector side. Discogs describes the true first mono as 47 West 63rd labels carrying Inc and the registered mark, while collector reports say most surviving copies turn up with New York USA labels or a split pair, matching Discogs' own 1962 transition listing. Those reports are anecdote rather than documentation, so treat an all 47 West 63rd copy as scarce rather than standard. The Classic Vinyl reissue is Kevin Gray's all-analog cut from the original tapes, pressed at Optimal, and it stands next to the real thing without apology.

Three days after Doin' Allright, same room, no second horn. May 9, 1961, Gordon with Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers on loan from Vee-Jay, and Philly Joe Jones. A quartet strips out the padding. Three of the tunes here, "Soul Sister," "I Want More" and "Ernie's Tune," were written for the 1960 Los Angeles production of Jack Gelber's play The Connection, which Gordon acted in and scored. That job is much of the reason he was in working shape by the spring of 1961 at all.

Philly Joe is why this one moves. He plays behind Gordon like a man arguing politely, and Drew stays out of the way in a manner suggesting he has heard the argument before and knows how it ends. Blue Note pulled two singles from the day, 45-1828 with "Soul Sister" split across both sides and 45-1829 pairing "Ernie's Tune" with "Modal Mood." Billboard called it solid jazz wax with some fine blowing by the tenor saxist in January 1962, which is thin praise for a record this good.

That eighth title is "Landslide," take four, cut on the day and left off the LP. It stayed unreleased until 1980, when Blue Note made it the title track of the compilation LT-1051. AllMusic's Michael G. Nastos gives the album four stars and calls it one of the more essential recordings of Gordon's career, and I am not going to fight him on it. Leonard Feather wrote the notes and Wolff shot the cover. No designer is credited on the Discogs entry, so do not assume Reid Miles by habit.

Dating this one is a mess worth knowing about. jazzdisco has the mono in 1961 and the stereo in 1962, Discogs dates the original mono to December 1961, and Wikipedia says released 1962 with Billboard reviewing it on January 20 of that year. Call it 1962 and assume the mono may have reached shops in the last weeks of 1961. On the deadwax, both mark styles turn up on genuine originals, the etched BN 4083-A VAN GELDER with a Plastylite ear and the stamped RVG form, so neither works as a first-pressing test.

August 27, 1962, and the quartet is Sonny Clark, Butch Warren and Billy Higgins. Three months earlier Gordon, Warren and Higgins had all been at Van Gelder's for Herbie Hancock's Takin' Off, but this is the first date the four of them made together as a unit, and it sounds like a band that has been out on the road for a year. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry with the class of 2018, which is the rare case of an institution agreeing with the people who actually own the record.

Sonny Clark is the second voice here and a large part of why copies of this get worn out. He comps behind Gordon with a dry patience and then solos as though the tempo were a suggestion he is considering. The LP was also resequenced for effect. jazzdisco's take numbers show the day opening with "Three O'Clock in the Morning" and reaching "Cheese Cake" fourth, yet "Cheese Cake" is what you hear first and "Three O'Clock" closes the album. Somebody in that building understood how a side should feel.

You will read everywhere that Gordon named this his own favorite record. That claim traces to uDiscover Music, which is published by Blue Note's parent company, and no primary interview turned up behind it, so take it as the label's story rather than the man's. Two smaller items while we are here. The jacket and labels read Go! with the exclamation point while AllMusic and the Discogs master drop it, and track A2 is "I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry" by Styne and Cahn, whatever shortened form you see quoted elsewhere.

Billboard ran it as Album Cover of the Week on December 15, 1962, which tells you what Reid Miles and Francis Wolff were doing to record jackets by then, and Down Beat reviewed it that February. If you own one Dexter Gordon album, this is it, and five stars needs no defending. One thing not to repeat at the bar: "Second Balcony Jump" gets called a 1946 Eckstine number constantly, but the tune runs back to the Earl Hines orchestra, so leave the first-recording claim alone.

Two days after Go, the same four men in the same room, and then Blue Note put it on a shelf for two years. Recorded August 29, 1962 in Englewood Cliffs, in the shops in October 1964, by which time Gordon was living in Europe and the band that made it had scattered. No source I found explains the delay, and I am not going to invent a reason for it. It is one of the odder release histories in a catalog that has plenty of them.

Three of the six titles are band originals, two by Gordon and one by his bassist. "The Backbone" is Butch Warren's, and a Blue Note sideman placing a composition on the leader's record in 1962 was not routine. Recording order was not LP order again: the day ran "McSplivens," "The Backbone," "Soy Califa" and then the three standards, closing on "Don't Explain," while the album opens with "Soy Califa" and buries "McSplivens" last. Blue Note's gloss of "Soy Califa" as I am Caliph is the label's own and has no independent source behind it.

Barbara Long wrote the liner notes, one of very few women credited with Blue Note notes in this stretch, and nothing else about her turned up anywhere, which is its own small comment on the era. The date is a shade looser than Go, and that shade is the whole difference between four stars and five. Clark is still tremendous. The standards get exactly the unhurried treatment Gordon built the rest of his career on.

Print 1964 and ignore the other years floating around. Discogs' original mono page shows 1962 by its pressing-sequence convention, and the top comment on that same page says the record was cut in 1962 and not released until 1964. AllMusic prints August 29, 1962 as the release date, which is the recording date sitting in the wrong field, a known bug on that site and the likely source of every stray year in circulation. Running times differ by twenty seconds between sources too, so do not panic over your copy.

May 23, 1963, CBS Studios in Paris, and one credit correction before anything else: Francis Wolff produced this record, not Alfred Lion. Claude Ermelin engineered it in France. Van Gelder never touched the session but cut the lacquers back in New Jersey, which is why a US original carries a VAN GELDER stamp for a tape made an ocean away. Wolff shot the cover, Reid Miles designed it, Nat Hentoff wrote the notes. American packaging wrapped around a French recording.

The band was not assembled for Gordon. Bud Powell, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke had been working Paris together as The Three Bosses since Powell moved over in 1959, so the leader is the one dropping in on somebody else's group. According to Michael Cuscuna's notes for the CD reissue, Kenny Drew was meant to be the pianist and the program was meant to be new Gordon compositions, but Powell got the chair and would not play new music, so the standards were chosen at the rehearsal. No source explains why Drew was replaced.

What came out of that compromise is five tracks: "Scrapple from the Apple," "Willow Weep for Me," "Broadway," "Stairway to the Stars" and "A Night in Tunisia." The Penguin Guide gave it a maximum rating and core-collection status and singled out that Tunisia as one of Gordon's finest performances on record. AllMusic's Thom Jurek gives it four and a half stars. Powell is not at his 1949 best, and it turns out not to matter at all, because Clarke's ride cymbal does the carrying.

Two notes before you buy. The CD-only tracks "Our Love Is Here to Stay" and "Like Someone in Love" appear on no 1963 pressing, and the second of those is a Powell performance with no Gordon on it, so the personnel footnote you see attached to track seven applies to reissues only. And deep groove is not a first-pressing test here. Discogs carries two 1963 US mono entries with only one flagged deep groove, while a collector write-up of an ear-bearing 1963 copy reports the groove already gone by then.

Side one is one tune. "Tanya," a Donald Byrd composition, runs 18:18 and fills the entire side, and side two holds "Coppin' the Haven" at 11:17 and "Darn That Dream" at 7:30. Three tracks, thirty-seven minutes. June 2, 1964 in Paris, with Kenny Drew on piano, Art Taylor on drums and a bassist called Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen who had turned eighteen six days before the session. Byrd is on the first two titles only and sits out the ballad.

The studio is contested, and the contest goes against Wikipedia. Its infobox and Blue Note's CD reissues from 1989 onward say CBS Studios in Paris. The 1965 jackets themselves, jazzdisco and LondonJazzCollector all say Studio Barclay, and the engineer credit backs Barclay: every edition credits Jacques Lubin, while the documented CBS Paris session, Our Man in Paris thirteen months earlier, credits Claude Ermelin. This page goes with Barclay and flags the other attribution, which looks like a carryover from the previous Paris date.

Recorded in Paris, mastered in New Jersey, so here is another US original wearing a VAN GELDER stamp for a session he never sat in on. Wolff produced and shot the cover, Reid Miles designed it, Leonard Feather wrote the notes, Plastylite pressed it. AllMusic's Michael G. Nastos gives it three and a half stars and says it rewards a listener as patient as the performers, which is a courteous way of saying that an eighteen-minute opener is going to ask you for something.

It asks, and it delivers, but this is the one Gordon album where I understand the people who bounce off it. "Tanya" is a groove piece that trusts its own tempo completely, and caught in the wrong mood it can feel like it is idling. Two housekeeping items: "Darn That Dream" is on the 1965 LP and is not a bonus track, and the 1989 CD adds an eleven-minute "Kong Neptune" from the same day, a quartet performance without Byrd.

One day, July 7, 1970, New York, six titles, finished. Gordon was living in Copenhagen by then, and this is a Prestige date wedged into a crowded American summer: this session on July 7, the Chicago dates with Gene Ammons that became The Chase! on July 26, the Charlie Parker Memorial Concert in Chicago on August 23, and The Jumpin' Blues back in New York on August 27. Don Schlitten produced it, designed it and shot it, Paul Goodman engineered, and Ira Gitler wrote the notes again.

Get the band right, because search results will hand you the wrong one. The quartet is Tommy Flanagan, Larry Ridley and Alan Dawson, confirmed by jazzdisco, Discogs, AllMusic and Wikipedia alike. The John Young, Rufus Reid and Wilbur Campbell lineup you will see attached to this title belongs to the July 26 Chicago sessions, three weeks later and a different record entirely. Flanagan is the point of the exercise anyway. He and Gordon share the same instinct for leaving the beat where they found it.

The room is less settled than the band. The OJC CD notes say RCA, which fits with Paul Goodman being an RCA staff engineer, but jazzdisco says only New York City, so nobody should name the studio with confidence. Composer credits are worse. AllMusic's credit block gives "Blues Walk" to Lou Donaldson while the review on the same page calls it Clifford Brown's, and the original pressing prints no composers at all. I am not picking a winner in that one.

Skip the story that "Valse Robin" was named for Gordon's daughter. It appears in the AllMusic review and nowhere else, which is not enough to print. What the record actually offers is a tenor player at full strength with a rhythm section that never crowds him, cut in a single day with no concept attached. The 2004 Complete Prestige box carries alternates of four of these titles if you want to hear how little the takes varied.

Gordon left the country soon after cutting A Swingin' Affair in August 1962 and came back for good in 1976, fourteen years later, having lived mostly in Paris and Copenhagen. December 11 and 12, 1976 at the Village Vanguard, two nights, Michael Cuscuna producing, Maxine Gregg as executive producer, Malcolm Addey recording and mixing. Gordon on the run itself, as Wikipedia quotes him: there was so much love and elation that it was a little eerie, and after the last set they would turn the lights on and nobody would move.

The band was borrowed. The jacket credits the backing group as the Louis Hayes and Woody Shaw Quintet, with Shaw appearing courtesy of Muse Records, so what Gordon came home to was an existing working unit rather than a pickup band, Ronnie Mathews on piano and Stafford James on bass. Shaw takes the Featuring credit and earns it. He stayed close afterward too, turning up on Sophisticated Giant in 1977 and Gotham City in 1981, both for Columbia.

Scott Yanow's point is that nobody saw the reception coming. Critics fell over themselves and young fans queued up for a man half the country had filed away. The playing carries the length that implies: eight of the ten CD tracks run at least eleven minutes, and the double LP sprawls the way a good club set sprawls, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on your patience. Gatefold jacket, disc matrices 34651 and 34652, cover art by John Collier, notes by Robert Palmer.

The title comes in three forms and none of them is exactly wrong. The jacket and Discogs read Homecoming, Live At The Village Vanguard; Wikipedia's infobox slots his name into the middle; AllMusic uses the version at the top of this review. Two data errors to ignore while you shop. AllMusic lists Woody Shaw playing tenor saxophone, which he did not, and Discogs credits "It's You or No One" to four names belonging to a different song of the same title. It is Styne and Cahn.