Cashbox : 04/23/1977

This double album, done live at the Village Vanguard, accurately captures the excitement of Dexter‘s visit last fall. Eight stretched–out titles with good Dexter, splendid Woody Shaw and a somewhat minor league rhythm section. First class packaging. We especially like Fenja, a Dexter original, and It’s You or No One. Long live Long Tall Dexter!

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Amherst Valley Advocate
Jack Cahill : 05/11/1977

In the critical stampede of praise for this album, I might as well add my voice to those yea-sayers: Homecoming is either a masterpiece or so close to it that argument is quibbling. Being that it’s a Dexter Gordon Album, I should say another masterpiece and an especially auspicious one since it heralds the return of this expatriated colossus to our shores and to the gladiatorial jazz arenas of the Big Apple, notably the Village Vanguard where this double album was recorded and where Dex was welcomed like a Caesar home from foreign campaigns.

To frame Dexter Gordon in the influence hierarchy would be to assign him an era and tag his contributions with a date. That would be unfair and untrue and unreflective of the dynamism he continues to exude almost 30 years after his supposed “heyday” with Fats Navarro, Wardell Gray and the other lubricated marvels of Bird bop. One can instantly detect the fluid power in his playing that was quintessential to the musical development of Rollins and Coltrane, but the 1977 Dex is a player of legendary proportions with extremely contemporary sensibilities.

Like the forward thinking Coleman Hawkins, Gordon is not a saxophonist to sit on his laurels. The invigorating quintet that Dexter uses on this session is indicative of that. From the hammering opener of Jimmy Heath‘s Gingerbread Boy and the measured swagger of Dexter’s subsequent solo, the direction is obviously straight ahead, strong and sinuous in ’70s style.

Woody Shaw‘s trumpet plays wraparound counterpoint to Gordon’s luxuriously deep toned tenor while the rhythm section of Ronnie Mathews, Stafford James and drummer Louis Hayes keeps the pilot light on high for the powerful frontline duo. On all eight pieces, Gordon takes the first solo and fills them with logically constructed improvisations that seem premeditated in their exactness. Mathews answers with nimble good sense, Shaw with a thoughtful stylish fire that makes his contributions far more than necessary addenda to Dexter’s statements.

On each and every tune, Dexter’s solos are classically built and sustained. Dexter Gordon plays Dexter Gordon and nobody else. On the accelerated original Backstairs, his uptempo flight is of characteristic leonine suppleness with regular dashes of chuckling insouciance that reveals the wild youth inside the graying veteran. Boppish cliches become fresh again in Dexter’s hands as he splays simple improvisatory riffs into finely wrought solo components with the merest new turn of an old phrase.

Dexter’s treatment of Round Midnight is exemplary, perhaps a classic to be. He strides the expanse of Monk‘s tune with an adventurous, but respectful step and opens up some lovely spaces in the somberness that I had never expected to find there. And like the giants of the past with whom he is numbered, Dexter’s solo builds irrevocably over its eight minutes until the realization at the release that the solo just played was a masterpiece.

In his early ascendancy, Dexter Gordon was called Vice Prez in deference to Prez himself, Lester Young. In the light of current trends and events, I think Dexter’s promotion is imminent.

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Boston Phoenix
Michael Ullman : 05/24/1977

In the late ’40s, when Dexter Gordon was part of the quartet of reed players in Billy Eckstine‘s pop band, people came to call the section “the Unholy Four” because, as Gordon once explained to jazz writer Ira Gitler, “We were full of tempestuous youth.” By adapting the tenor sax to the new rhythms of bebop, by hardening his tone and restricting his vibrato to play with the supple virtuosity crucial to the new music, the young Dexter Gordon became a major jazz figure. Influenced perhaps by the lighter-toned Lester Young‘s subtle harmonic and rhythmic devices, Gordon would have none of the eerily elusive emotional quality of the older player’s style. Instead he was forceful and direct.

Gordon’s mature style is one of the most remarkable in jazz, combining straightforward power with witty allusiveness, passion with self-possession. On a blues he tends to string together short patterned phrases, breaking off just as the pattern verges on cliche. Then he might begin a new series or introduce a quotation from another song. The result is a cohesive solo that seems both familiar and surprising. Some people are troubled by Gordon’s habitual quotes, which suggest an emotional detachment incompatible with Gordon’s aggressive, committed style. But while quoting Here Comes the Bride might ruin a Body and Soul, for example, in an uptempo blues it is a witty indication of an active musical intelligence and temporarily releases the tension in his solos without hindering the sense of his involvement.

Last winter, Gordon returned to the States from Copenhagen, his home for over a decade. He was immediately booked into New York’s Village Vanguard, where he played a triumphant engagement backed by the Woody Shaw–Louis Hayes quartet, a fine choice to bring out Gordon’s hard-bop virtuosity. A two-record set preserving eight long performances from that gig, Homecoming features two attractive Gordon compositions (one, the driving blues, Backstairs, inspires his most exciting solo), a couple of standards and some tunes by members of the group. The set does have its weak moments: Shaw’s Little Red’s Fantasy has an attractively lilting theme but an awkward bridge; at times the rhythm section is hyperactive; and the group lacks a convincing ballad style. But Homecoming is an admirable recording: the quality of the sound is good and the master tenor saxophonist, still youthful in his 50s, sounds as if he’s come home to stay.

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Buffalo News
Jeff Simon : 04/30/1977

Expatriate tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon found himself cloaked in the gold lame mantle of media chic on his last sojourn through America.

Worse things can happen to you. Neglect, for one. Bubonic plague, for another.

Still, it must have come as a bit of a surprise for the 54-year old musician to find himself “so madly in” as Julie Christie might have said in “Darling.”

If the three days of turnaway crowds at Buffalo’s Tralfamadore Cafe indicate anything about his reception elsewhere, Gordon was welcomed as lavishly as prophets usually are when their countries guiltily decide to honor them.

By the way, he will return in June for one night at the Statler Hilton.

—

Gordon is, after all, one of the essential jazz tenor men. His hard, metallic tone and be-bop lines showed John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Booker Ervin the way in their early careers.

But that doesn’t account for the hosannas flung in Gordon’s direction.

If he weren’t physically immense (6 foot 5 inches), photogenically handsome and looked instead like the late Booker Ervin (that is, like a bespectacled subway conductor), all those thronging crowds would probably be chanting in unison “Dexter WHO?”

Gordon’s Homecoming (Columbia PG-34650) is a two-record live set from Gordon’s “madly in” December gig at New York’s Village Vanguard. Despite predictably excessive proclamations, Homecoming is simply a good set of conventional hard bop. Gordon used the Woody Shaw–Louis Hayes group for backing and they provided immensely sympathetic company.

The trouble is that the combination of Gordon’s gigantic tone and Lester Youngish laying-behind-the-beat seems to make his solos flabby.

Something seems missing – the infallible sense of structure of early and middle Rollins, the impassioned facility of Coltrane, something.

—

For all those who claim a sense of structure for a Gordon solo, he is a very episodic player.

All those times he quotes The Wedding March here (on Backstairs and Gingerbread Boy) or Chicago, Chicago (on Backstairs, for instance) are not so much examples of wit as admissions that his solos don’t have a great sense of direction.

What Gordon does have Is what you might expect from a man who was a consummate 52nd St. jammer in his early age. What Gordon has that younger players might not is steam.

He doesn’t always go any place interesting with his solos but he chugs along with magnificent strength.

By the time he finishes. soloing on something like Gingerbread Boy, the overall impression isn’t one of episodic garrulity but rather the staying power to keep going through the aimlessness to keep up the emotional steam.

He seems to know exactly how many choruses it will take to get there, even though phrase after phrase goes by without any urgency whatsoever.

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Hartford Courant
Owen McNally : 04/24/1977
Gordon’s Prodigious Talents

Dexter Gordon‘s live recordings at the Village Vanguard on his new Columbia release, Homecoming, may be well THE Jazz Album of the Year.

The two LP set (PG-34650) is literally a royal homecoming for one of the noblest and ablest tenor saxophonists in jazz history.

It’s a homecoming for the black American expatriate, who, since 1962, has lived mostly in Copenhagen. Over the years, Gordon has performed most frequently at the Danish jazz club, the Montmartre, but has made tours of the Continent and Japan, with now and then a jaunt back to the States for recording sessions and concert dates.

Usually his base of operations in this country has been on the West Coast. These performances at the Village Vanguard last Dec. 11 and 12 marked his first time back on the New York scene in four years.

His appearance in that famed basement jazz spot drew a whole new generation of jazz fans. Many had perhaps come out of curiosity to hear the saxophonist who had influenced Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane back in the 1950s. Later, as Coltrane and Rollins moved out further in their respective ranges, Gordon, in turn, picked up on what they were playing and managed to synthesize their new developments into his own work.

Back in the 1940s as a young musician with Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson and particularly later, with the then innovative Billy Eckstine Band, he was working his own kind of unique synthesis of Lester Young and Charlie Parker.

Even then as a wunderkind, he was playing a hard-driving tenor with modern roots. Now, on the eight cuts on these new sides, Gordon, the 54-year-old jazz veteran, is no longer the wunderkind. Now he’s just an out-and-out wonder, the prodigy whose constantly honed talents just keep getting more prodigious over the years.

Right from opening 12-bar blues number, Jimmy Heath‘s Gingerbread Boy, Gordon is off and flying, displaying his masterful technique and boundless inventiveness. Whether booming into the sonorous depths of his horn’s lower register or striding to the top of the tenor’s falsetto pitches, Gordon sings and swings with matchless joy through his instrument.

Here and throughout the album he is backed up by a superb small band consisting of Woody Shaw on trumpet and flugelhorn, Ronnie Mathews on piano, Stafford James on bass and Louis Hayes on drums.

Shaw’s playing alone makes the album worthwhile. Pianist Ronnie Mathews is as solid as a rock with his chorded passages and limber and spritely with his fleet single-note lines. Flowing through his distinctive style are hints of Red Garland, Wynton Kelly and even Cecil Taylor at times. Stafford James and Louis Hayes, a formidable rhythm duo, keep everything moving along with vibrant fluidity.

There’s a lot of interplay among Gordon’s younger “supporting players.” Shaw plays off ideas from Hayes and James. And James plays with a rich, round resonating tone. Sometimes his bass lines are a bedrock. Other times they move around with freedom, yet always sustaining the group’s straight-ahead propulsive drive.

Obviously, the Shaw-Hayes band had been together for sometime before they linked up for this special occasion with Gordon. Fortunately, it isn’t just a pickup group of all-stars tossed together for a one-night stand. In fact, the band has been a highly successful working unit in New York. Its regular reedman is René McLean, of Hartford, a distinguished saxophonist in his own right, who has often worked with his father, saxophonist Jackie McLean.

It’s hard to pick the best selection among the eight since they’re all so good. Fenja, a Gordon composition dedicated to his Danish wife, is a fine example of the saxophonist in a lyrical, reflective mood. Round Midnight, the Thelonious Monk evergreen, sounds even greener and more elegant than ever in this interpretation. On two Shaw charts, Little Red’s Fantasy and In Case You Haven’t Heard, Gordon plays with a modern inflection that shows that he is still expanding his musical consciousness, still incorporating fresh elements into his always palatable musical palette of many colors.

It’s You Or No One, an old tune, is completely rejuvenated by Dex and the Gang, and turned into a soaring, stomping venture into spontaneity and impeccable good taste. Mathews’ Let’s Get Down is a boppish number that again, is filled with Gordon’s dazzling dexterity – a most suitable gift for posterity.

The album’s grand finale swings out on Gordon’s own tune, Backstairs, an uptempo blues in B flat. The only regret over this number is that it marks the final out. In this case a two-disc set just isn’t enough.

Gordon’s work throughout is graced with many a felicitous phrase. There are probably enough oh-so-well turned ideas here to keep any number of saxophonists in business for entire careers.

His tone is assertive, sometimes lean and tensile; at other times grainy and rich in texture. His phrasing is melodic, moving with a very free, lithe spirit over the harmonic changes.

Everything is held tightly together by his keen sense of form. Underneath that sparkling spontaneity lurks an unerring sense of structure, producing a blend of free invention with a logic that pulls it all together into artful works of fascinating hues and contours.

Mixed with this Jamesian sense of cohesiveness is Gordon’s impish rejoicing in musical puns, interpolations and allusions. His vocabulary takes a Joycean, incandescent delight in playing off and finding new connotations in familiar tunes which pop up now and then in his choruses. Somehow, for example, he weds Here Comes the Bride into one of his choruses on Gingerbread Boy without spoiling his recipe for success by even one bit.

The Village Vanguard – scene of many a momentous modern jazz event – was filled with young enthusiastic fans that squeezed in along with many jazz celebrities. Among the musicians in the Standing Room Only audience for these sessions were: Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, John McLaughlin, the Brecker brothers, the Heath brothers, Horace Silver, Dave Liebman, Jimmy Owens, Julius Hemphill, Barry Altschul, Art Blakey, Stan Getz and many, many others.

Phoebe Snow, according to the New York Times’ Robert Palmer, came, heard a single Gordon ballad solo, and “was moved to tears.”

Gordon’s triumphal return was also a big media event with extensive coverage in the New York Times, the Village Voice and interviews on TV. New York, the media capitol of the world, was finally treating an American jazz superstar much the same way they are treated in Europe or Japan.

Not long after the Vanguard sessions, Gordon performed and lectured at a master class for Hartt College of Music’s Afro-American Music Department. It was a favor to his old friend Jackie McLean, head of Hartt’s black music studies program.

Gordon returns again to Connecticut June 19 in concert with the Shaw-Hayes band at Sprague Hall on the Yale campus in New Haven. The jazz event is one in a series sponsored by Creative Concerts, a non-profit charitable group.

Later, we’ll take a look at Dexter riding again on Inner City’s six Steeple Chase releases. Until then, sample the Columbia gem – the first in his new contract for that label. Homecoming is an ebullient celebration by this master musician of the unquenchable creative force that infuses the best of jazz. It’s an invaluable record of the brilliant notes of a Native Son.

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Loyola College Greyhound
Bert Waters : 05/13/1977
Dexter Gordon quartet – straight ahead, erotic, and twice as much

Dexter Gordon, the 52-year-old handsome and glib expatriate tenor saxophonist from Copenhagen, has undoubtedly established himself as the premier figurehead in the jazz community with his heroic ’76 tour of the U.S., and this past Sunday evening he and his rhythm section again captivated a Mother’s Day SRO audience with a melodic and straightahead performance at the Left Bank Jazz Society.

Looking tall and healthier than he ever has, Dex took the stand smiling and resplendently attired in a bright dashiki and blew his way into a harmonically rich rendition of the jazz standard Green Dolphin Street.

Dexter Gordon Quartet: Gordon (tenor and soprano saxophones), George Cables (piano), Rufus Reid (bass), Billy Hart (drums).

It was already noticeable during his first solo that he and drummer Billy Hart (a member of Herbie Hancock‘s memorable Mwandishi Sextet of the early seventies) would lead the group to its highest peaks. It almost seems like a waste of time to attempt an analysis and portrayal of these moments.

What is there really to say? Billy Harts” accentuations on Dexter’s involuting saxophonics revealed an inspiring personal assimilation and dissemination of his ever-frowing predecessors like Art Blakey, Max Roach, Elvin Jones (all of whom Dex has played in his earlier years).

If Dex reached for a quick jet in the bottom register, Billy Hart was right there with a contrapuntal riffling of the cymbals. During the blue ballad You’ve Changed Dexter was groaning and shrieking his way to the top when Billy Hart suddenly slipped out of his regular beat on the snare and cymbal with a trapdoorlike thump that stopped everything but the musicians themselves.

All the musicians grinned in confidence and played on. Yet the point is that one really had to be there in order to ideally grasp the beauty of the music. It reminds me how the British reviewer, Russ Tompkins, once described the music of Cecil Taylor in one word – “erotic.” Believe me, so is the Dexter Gordon Quartet.

Roaring through some of his more recent compositions like The Apartment, Backstairs, Fried Bananas, Entebuss and Ah Ah, Dexter and Billy Hart, along with the rippling pianistics of George Cables (who in no way masked his enthusiasm for this opportunity) and the humorous plucking of bassist Rufus Reid shuffled the moods, the volume and tempos in a way that left no song insurmountable.

One of Dexter’s trademarks is his ability to insert musical jokes, like the theme of Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, at will in his solos. For instance he concluded Ah Ah so naturally with the opening bars from an older composition, Soy Califas.

Ah Ah was also especially significant as Dexter played soprano (with which he has never recorded and rarely, if ever, played publicly) with a distinct sonorous, frictional quality. On a minor up-tempo version of the tenor saxophone’s national anthem, Body and Soul, (popularized by Coleman Hawkins), Dexter enchanted the audience by weaving Thelonious Monk‘s Round Midnight in and out – twice as much love as anyone could want from music. Once again, though, the tour de force was Tanya and for the listeners’ sake he always emphasizes that it is an “old Donald Byrd composition from the LP One Flight Up.” One can practically see and feel themselves in one of those old, red-brick city tenements with the fire escape on the facade, longing, sadly and gladly, for their lover as Dexter moans, wails, laughs and sings the blues interchangeably on his sax while Billy Hart spearheads the rhythm section’s stress on each of Dexter’s different statements. The power in this music is that anyone anywhere can feel sensations like these regardless of their social background. Maybe that’s a bit presumptuous – but it’s just an immediate impression.

It’s been a strange odyssey for Dexter Gordon, whose bop-tenor playing in the late forties and early fifties is of seminal importance that left an indelible stamp on the early styles of tenor stalwarts like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and even the master alto-saxist Jackie McLean credits him as his greatest influence beside Charlie Parker. In the middle and late fifties his activity was inhibited by a habit which he overcome by the sixties. Soon after he departed for a tour of Britain and the Continent, from which he rarely returned until recently and triumphantly.

His return has been welcomed with SRO crowds, press stories, recording dates with Prestige, Columbia and Xanadu records, and with future bookings. Still he plans to remain in Copenhagen. So, since Dexter Gordon won’t be back until next year the best records on which to hear him are: Blue Note Reissue Series (this is an excellent composite of his four early-sixties recording dates), Long Tall Dexter: Savoy Records (this package contains the best of his bop era recordings), Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard (like the first two, this package is a double LP set, and was recorded last November in New York – -it’s a wide open blowing session with the Woody Shaw Quintet very similar to his concert here at Left Bank). Finally I feel that his best efforts on record are in the early Herbie Hancock session for Blue Note records, Takin’ Off which also includes Freddie Hubbard. His foreign recordings for the Steeplechase label are now on the Inner City label and therefore available at U.S. prices. They come highly recommended – especially the collaborations with Jackie McLean – but I haven’t had the good fortune to get them on my turntable yet.

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New York Times
Robert Palmer : 10/22/1976
Jazz: Return of Saxophonist Packs Club

Dexter Gordon, the most gifted and influential tenor saxophonist to emerge from the modern jazz movement of the 1940’s, played his first American engagement in four years at Storyville on Wednesday and Thursday. Mr. Gordon who settled in Copenhagen some years ago when the popularity of jazz was perhaps at its lowest ebb here, seemed surprised that the club was packed and the listeners almost aggressively adoring.

He responded with a broad smile and some of the most accomplished and stirring improvisations heard here in recent years.

In fact, Mr. Gordon re‐established himself as the living master of the tenor saxophone with his first night of playing. Many of the aficionados who crowded into the club had never doubted his importance, of course, but some remembered performances here four years ago, or more recent appearances in Europe when Mr. Gordon was in less than optimum form. Those days seem to be over, as more listeners will be able to discover when Mr. Gordon performs at the Village Vanguard from Oct. 26 to 31.

On opening night at Storyville, the saxophonist could do no wrong. His solos were graceful, soaring constructions, full of legato phrases that laid hack into the beat, carefully blockednut double‐time passages, brusque lower register punctuations, and meaningful silences.

The fire in his playing must have been because of, at least in part, his energetic and astute accompanists, at least one of whom, the bassist Stafford James, surpassed his substantial prior accomplishments with solo passages of sustained brilliance.

But the evening belonged to the saxophonist. In a fall season that has already witnessed several important jazz events, Mr. Gordon’s return is the most important event so far.

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Oakland Tribune
R.B. Ragg : 06/26/1977
Dexter Gordon Deserves More Celebration Than Homecoming

Saxophonist Dexter Gordon‘s Blue Note and Prestige albums were okay, and his new bid for American recognition (after living in Europe for the past 15 years), Homecoming, is nice, but it’s hard to tell from listening to it why Gordon is an important jazzman.

Check out any of the half dozen Gordon albums recorded in the past couple years and released in the United States on the Inner City label, and you’ll get the real story. The most fascinating is an orchestral album arranged and conducted by Palle Mikkelborg (Denmark), More Than You Know. At first John Coltrane‘s Naima sounds a bit eerie, but the beauty grows with repeated listenings, much like a Charles Mingus record does. There are allusions to Gil Evans, Ellington and Coleman, but mostly it’s a flip-flop between ballads and bop. The fascinating arrangements beat anything Gordon’s contemporary Charlie Parker ever did with an orchestra.

Swiss Nights, the Gordon quartet recorded at the Zurich Jazz Festival in 1975, is more straight-ahead bopping and ballading from Sonny Rollins Tenor Madness to Days of Wine and Roses. The same group joined by Jackie McLean on Jackie McLean featuring Dexter Gordon (two albums subtitled “The Source” and “The Meeting”) include a fascinating jazzification of Grofe’s On the Trail (from the Grand Canyon Suite), but most of all the records allow two greats of saxophone improvisation to work together on their own terms.

Even more traditional than the above, True Blue is a jam I session with Gordon, Al Cohn (tenor sax), trumpeters Blue Mitchell and Sam Noto, pianist Barry Harris, drummer Louis Hayes and bassist Sam Jones. They pick standards like How Deep Is the Ocean and play them lively, though not as creatively as other, Gordon records reviewed here.

All of which leaves me wondering why Gordon’s work for the big name record companies, Columbia in particular, don’t have the same bite and excitement as his other work. Is it in his playing, or in the recording and mixing that the energy is drained? Homecoming is a safe two-disc set of traditional bop, as is True Blue, but the other albums are all much more interesting and experimental. Gordon deserves much more attention than he has attained so far in this country, and his Inner City recordings may bring it to him.

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The Village Voice
Gary Giddins : 11/01/1976
Long Tall Dexter Bites the Apple

Dexter Gordon is back and his magnetism and strength can hardly fail to trivialize a scene grown weak-kneed with commercialism and increasingly devoid of celebratory swing. He is back from his adopted Copenhagen with his wife, Fenja, and two-year-old son, Benjamin – named after fellow expatriate/tenor master Ben Webster – for a 10-week tour of the country, including his first New York club appearances, two nights at Storyville and a week at the Village Vanguard, since 1969. Anticipation has been running hot and heavy; the full house at Storyville, despite a rainstorm, was so shamelessly elated – after the last of three exhausting sets it stood roaring for five minutes – that one could easily forget that it would be coterie and not mass audiences greeting his return. Still, one thought of the surviving titans of the saxophone and could be certain only of Gordon, and Sonny Rollins and Benny Carter and ahhhh…

It was not always thus. Asked why he’s been away so long, he says, “Nobody asked me.” In previous years, he did perform in Los Angeles and Chicago but “that’s because most of my contacts are on the West Coast, that’s really my home.” He comes back to the United States for the Christmas holidays, partly to escape the Scandinavian winter, and while he is invariably welcomed with unending choruses of good-to-have-you-back, the enthusiasm hasn’t always been translated into opportunities for work. Incredible, but true. I reminded him of the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival when George Wein ushered him off the stage after two numbers, to the dismay of those of us who had journeyed far to hear two expatriates, Gordon and Don Byas (who also played two numbers), and Dexter said, “Yeah, mention that! I certainly felt like playing more than that.” At a more recent Newport – New York festival, he was given similarly short shrift at a Lionel Hampton reunion concert. “Well, that’s Lionel,” he says smiling.

A number of things have conspired to reemphasize Dexter Gordon’s presence in the world. Most long-term expatriates are quickly forgotten here, but he has always managed to sustain a moderate American audience in addition to his more clamorous European following. For one thing, he is one of a handful of soloists whose playing has grown consistently over more than 30 years. He is frankly contemptuous of players who haven’t kept up with the music and are playing the same way they did during the 40s. Clearly, for Gordon “keeping up” means an open-mindedness to new directions in harmony and tonal conception, not transitory fads and trappings. He continues to play the blues and I-got-rhythm configurations, favorite ballads – he has developed into one of the great ballad interpreters – and his own uniquely witty and jumping originals. In the late ’60s, Coltrane was suddenly gone, Rollins was on a sabbatical, and Getz was uneven and elusive. The most striking of the avant-gardists, Albert Ayler, was killed, while the best modern and neo-modern tenors seemed exiled even in America: Shorter content to deliver weather reports, Mobley rarely playing at all, Shepp in college, Heath and Cohn on view only intermittently. Ammons died, Moody went into the studios, Stitt lost his fire, Rollins discovered crossover. Only Zoot remained constant. Dexter Gordon – who was, in any case, the best tenor saxophonist of his generation – began to loom as the last of the Mohicans.

Gordon’s attractiveness is built on his music but is not confined by it. He is one of the few charismatic men in jazz. His very image on a bandstand is reassuring, and perfectly complements the deep sanguinity of his sound, the effusiveness of his ideas, the galvanizing effect of his swing. He is six feet five with a powerful frame and a face that combines distinguished handsomeness and childlike glee. He introduced each selection at Storyville in a clear serious voice, ignoring the requests chattering back to him, and responded to the wild applause following each selection by smiling broadly and holding his tenor horizontally aloft, partly as invocation and partly in suggestion that the credit be shared with his mighty Selmer.

His sound is incomparable – capable of stovepipe brilliance on fast tempos and dark sobriety on ballads. He can honk so powerfully in the lower register, you might expect walls to crumble before him, and his husky cries in the hidden register can be chilling. It is a sound with depth and authenticity, something you want to reach out and touch. His phrases combine laid-back Lestorian riffs with his own uniquely forthright melodies and boppish fillips, which he inserts with body English – the right foot climbing up the left leg.

If Rollins’s humor tends towards the sardonic and parodic, then Gordon’s might be described as intellectually impish. One of the numerous lessons he learned well from Lester Young – whose very name causes Dexter’s eyes to widen, his palms to turn upwards, and a low, Fonzie-like ayyyyyyy to emit from his throat – is to know the lyrics of the songs he plays: “It gives you a fuller understanding of what the song is about.” He introduces ballads by reciting a few lines of the lyric, and his quotations are often motivated as much by the lyric content as the musical appropriateness. Gordon wasn’t the first to color his solos with quotations – Armstrong did it occasionally, and Tatum was a master of it – but he developed it into a fine art. On a 32-bar original called Fried Bananas, I jotted down the following references: Stranger in Paradise, Day-0, Dr. Hackenbush, Sonny Boy, It Could Happen to You, and two others that nibbled at my tongue all evening without identifying themselves. The pug-nosed kid in Polka Dots and Moonbeams turned out to be Mona Lisa. The compatibility between such levity and the enormous intensity of Gordon’s improvisatory thrust underscores the central paradox of bop, that it is a music where relaxation and tension are inseparable. You begin with tempos that are outrageously fast, chord sequences designed with bravura, and melodic labyrinths, and then you have to improvise a convincing story without seeming to be pressured or hurried or desperate. Swing becomes syncopated cool.

Gordon was born in Los Angeles 53 years ago; he started on clarinet at 13, switched to alto two years later, and tenor two years after that. He describes L.A. as being isolated in the ’30s. “It was almost like living in Europe. Only the biggest bands came out, like Dorsey, Hines, Duke, Louis, but there were some good locals like Hampton and Marshal Royal. All my lunch money went to used 78s.” In 1939, he heard the Basie band with Lester Young. “Prez! He had that special thing that floored me. I tried to play like him. He was the first to play color tones, like sixths and ninths.” Gordon was very much under the Young influence when he joined Hampton’s band, where his fellow tenor was Illinois Jacquet, about whom he says, “We were both listening to the same thing, but he leaned more to Herschel [Evans, also of the Basie band] and I leaned more to Prez. At that time Hawkins was the dominant figure with purists – Lester, with his light sound, wasn’t considered in the same class. But he had such spirit and joie de vivre.”

The two main schools of the tenor sax are those founded by Hawkins and Young, and Gordon is frequently mentioned as the first man to combine aspects of both into a distinct style, which in turn influenced the three major tenors of the ’50s: Coltrane, Rollins, Getz. Actually, it was Herschel Evans, a Hawkins disciple, who had the greater impact on Dexter, since Hawkins was in Europe until 1939, and the Basie band was ubiquitous. It wasn’t until he heard Hawkins in New York that Dexter realized that part of his greatness was his ability to hear the younger players and “keep up.” Comparing them, he notes, “Hawk was going out farther on the chords, but Lester leaned to the pretty notes. He had a way of telling a story with everything he played, simple and direct. The cats at the corner candy store would make up lyrics to Prez’s solos and jam.”

In 1941, Dexter was sitting in Hampton’s orchestra for a Battle of the Bands at the Savoy. The opposition was Jay McShann. “I dug his alto player, he had a lot of Lester in his playing, and also Jimmy Dorsey.” Jimmy Dorsey? “He was a master saxophonist, Bird knew that.” The altoist was Charlie Parker, of course; he provided the third major ingredient in Dexter’s evolving style. “He was playing so much saxophone, new tunes, new harmonic conceptions, he extended the chords, altering them fluidly. Prez stayed around ninths – he must have listened to Ravel and Debussy – but Bird went all the way up the scale.” Gordon became a part of the new movement which the press dubbed bop. “We used to go by Dizzy‘s house and he’d be playing piano and changes; it was like a little school ’cause cats went up there all the time. I didn’t like Monk at first because he wasn’t an impressive pianist like Bud, later on, of course…” He met the other tenors who had come up the same way, listening to Prez and then Bird, especially Wardell Gray and Gene Ammons. “Ammons was playing like Ben [Webster] when he first joined the Eckstine band. After I joined, the motherfucker changed his style in a minute.”

Before Eckstine, however, there was a stay with Louis Armstrong’s big band. Louis had walked up to him in a club in L.A. and said, “Hey, gates, I like your tone kid, you got a nice tone.” The next night, Teddy McRae, the band’s straw boss, hired him. Dexter was unhappy with the ’30s arrangements Armstrong used, and the spiritlessness he perceived among the band members, but he loved Armstrong. “When we left L.A., going on the road, I had a dozen Prince Albert cans of good Mexican pot. Every night at intermission, Pops and I would go out and smoke. After a week, he didn’t bring his shit anymore – I wouldn’t tell him, but it was lemonade. I said, ‘Damn Pops, I notice you don’t bring out that New Orleans Golden Leaf.’ He said, ‘Man, that’s like bringing hamburger to a banquet.'”‘

By the late ’40s, Gordon had developed the most influential new approach to the tenor. He had also become involved in a series of enormously popular tenor battles. It began with Eckstine singing, “Blow Mr. Gene, blow Mr. Dexter, too.” In addition to Ammons, he subsequently took on Teddy Edwards, Budd Johnson, baritone saxophonist Leo Parker, and, most significantly, Wardell Gray. At the same time, he composed an impressive number of riff tunes for recording sessions on Savoy and Dial. Jimmy Heath has described Gordon as the central influence on the second wave of modernist tenorists because even Lester seemed dated to them by 1949. One of the musicians most profoundly touched by Gordon’s music, particularly his harmonic inventiveness, was John Coltrane, only three. years Gordon’s junior. By 1960, Coltrane would build a new lexicon on Dexter’s foundation, using Indian and pentatonic scales, chord patterns within chords, and phrase permutations, which Gordon, like Hawkins learning from Parker, would investigate and incorporate into his own playing.

But first there was a near-barren decade. By 1950 a new school of tenors had come on the scene. Ironically, they were as beholden to Lester Young as was Dexter, but their style was called cool. “We used to jam together – Zoot, Al Cohn, Allen Eager. Zoot and I worked in a club in Hollywood for Norman Granz. He was playing Lester and I was playing Lester, but there was always a difference.” Gordon was no longer as fashionable; worse, he was busted for narcotics and served two years at a minimum-security prison called Chino, appearing in a movie filmed there, Unchained. (There is a scene where Dexter is playing in the prison band, but what you hear is the overdub of a studio musician.) He recorded a couple of albums in 1955, and wasn’t heard from again on records until 1960, when Cannonball Adderley produced an album called The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon. He was soon cast as the lead musician and composer for a West Coast production of The Connection, and, more significantly, embarked on a series of six albums for Blue Note, making clear his increased prowess in every aspect of his music: They are among the finest recordings by any tenor saxophonist. Pressed to name one album he would recommend to someone who didn’t know his music, he offered GO! – one of two Blue Note sessions with the late Sonny Clark – “Isn’t he beautiful? He was my man” – and Billy Higgins.

He was clean, and inspired. But there was no work, and in New York he was denied a cabaret card. He first went to Europe in 1962 after meeting Ronnie Scott, proprietor of a jazz club in London, in a restaurant. Scott promised him a month in London and a tour of the continent. “I didn’t intend on staying, it just happened. I was working all the time and having a ball in this new environment. Before I realized it, a couple of years had gone by and I was considered an expatriate.” He returned for six months in 1965, “but the scene was disillusioning.” Again, there was a period of scant recording – until 1969, when he signed with Prestige. He eventually settled in Copenhagen, married, and began, recording with the new SteepleChase label, which allowed him to realize the ambition of performing with a string orchestra. He is especially proud of the resultant album, More Than You Know, and rightly so. He plans to stay in Copenhagen – “I have roots there now” – where he plays with both local and visiting American musicians, and performs a good deal on television and radio.

He will be at the Village Vanguard through Sunday; and then another night at Storyville; don’t miss him. You may have to wait another seven years.

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Washington Star
Bill Bennett : 06/01/1977
The ‘Expatriate’ Finally Gets His Due

“I did an interview with (New York jazz critic) Ira Gitler; when I read it, he referred to ‘expatriate Dexter Gordon,’ and I thought, ‘Is that me?’ I just never thought about it.”

So tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, appearing at the Showboat Lounge now through Sunday night, dismisses most of the brouhaha surrounding his “triumphal return from self-imposed exile” in Copenhagen. The fact is that Gordon has lived in Copenhagen since 1962; that his decision to do so was based on the greater respect accorded an artist by Europeans; that he has settled, married and fathered a son there; and that his appearances on the East Coast since that time have been rare.

Out of context, all that would seem justification for the title of his recently-released first album for Columbia Records, Homecoming. Still, the true context of Gordon’s 15-year residence abroad makes the title more than a bit forced.

Dexter Gordon was born in Los Angeles in 1923 and grew up during what he calls “a very special time” in the city’s musical life. There were many opportunities for the young musician, including many jazz clubs, and a great many budding jazzmen, including Chico Hamilton, Melba Liston and Charles Mingus.

Gordon left Los Angeles at 17, taking to the road with the Lionel Hampton band, where he apprenticed for three years. He was with Louis Armstrong for six months before joining the jazz vanguard in Billy Eckstine‘s ground-breaking band – longtime local residents might note that his first gig with Mr. B’s band was at the Howard Theater in 1944.

It was with Eckstine that the tenorman absorbed the revolutionary teachings of the Beboppers, lessons he successfully transposed to the tenor sax, melding them with the tradition established by Lester Young. In so doing, he forged a style that remained influential through the great tenor melting pot of the ’50s, helping to shape the music of such diverse players as Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter and Jimmy Heath. The languidly swinging rhythmic lag common to all these artists can be attributed directly to Gordon.

As long as “roots” are in vogue, it is worth noting that Gordon’s are in Los Angeles, that he has two daughters and a grandson there, and that through the “expatriate” years he has made annual “pilgrimages” to the West Coast, wreathing the Christmas holidays in concerts and club dates. Taking these visits into account makes Gordon’s conquest of New York and the jazz press in general last fall a bit anti-climactic; a large part of the intense publicity may well have stemmed from the interest in the repatriation of Gordon’s fellow “expatriate,” trumpeter Ted Curson.

Indeed, the furor might have died quickly were it not for the presence of Columbia Records’ President Bruce Lundvall at one of Gordon’s first appearances; the executive was understandably taken with the saxophonist’s performance. A contract was duly signed; an engagement at the famed Village Vanguard duly recorded: The result is Homecoming, and, in the last analysis, Homecoming is a rather disappointing effort.

The question raised by Homecoming is much the same one raised by the quartet on stage at the Showboat: Will the “new” Dexter Gordon ever find an appropriate Stateside rhythm section? The quartet at the Showboat survives on the strength of Gordon’s horn and Rufus Reid‘s bass. Gordon rolls along rather glibly, lacking the inspirational rhythmic boot in an appropriate quarter. Apparently missing the challenge of Woody Shaw‘s imaginative trumpet, the saxophonist falls back on his great talent for interpolation of familiar material: Laura, Would You Like to Swing on a Star, Clifford Brown‘s Daahoud, and even Jingle Bells make cameo appearances in one or another of his solos.

Gordon’s style has always been somewhat detached, depending equally on his rhythm section and the internal pulse of his melodies. Last night, the wit and inflectional nuance that one has come to expect from Dexter Gordon were there, but his continuity of phrase suffered from this deficient support. There is reason to hope that the arrangements of “expatriate” trombonist Slide Hampton and the drumming of Washingtonian Billy Hart will provide that support on his next Columbia venture, but only time will tell.

In the meantime, despite all the inconsistencies, Dexter Gordon is smiling. After all, his new album is on the charts, and, he reflects, “I’ve never been on the charts before.”

Being with a major label, he points out, “do make a difference”; when asked if he likes that difference, Gordon’s grin is large and regal. The response is that of a man who has paid his dues, and is at last getting his due.

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Down Beat : 04/21/1977
Chuck Berg : 5 stars

As I put the first side of Dex‘s double-disc debut album for Columbia on the turntable, I felt some apprehension. My primary concern was based on the strong desire to see the masterful Dex and his special brand of musical integrity succeed, to be an influential force in the currents of contemporary music. My second concern centered on whether or not the warm memories of Dex’s December stand at the Vanguard would survive in the face of the event’s vinyl documentation. Several bars from Dex’s big booming tenor relieved all anxieties. In fact, after repeated listenings it is clear that Homecoming will stand as one of the landmark albums of the ’70s.

The music radiates joy, ebullience, love, compassion and commitment. Dexter’s opening solo on Jimmy Heath‘s sinewy blues-based Gingerbread Boy is forged from dramatic single-note suspensions, repeated figures, chromatic cascades, permutations of basic bop patterns and liberal sprinklings of quotes from such sources as Here Comes The Bride. Building from the bottom to the top of his horn, Dex shrieks with joy before concluding with the playful taunt I Can Do Anything Better Than You Can. With that as a keynote, the remainder of the album functions as a good-natured dialogue between Gordon’s younger colleagues’ “yes I can” assertions and papa Dex’s “no you can’t” challenges. This ritual testing based on mutual affection, respect and trust serves as a transformer which jolts the proceedings with constantly fresh waves of pulsing energy.

Woody Shaw‘s Little Red’s Fantasy offers a challenging harmonic structure in which forces of light and dark swirl in mysteriously clouded configurations. In his solo, Dex proves himself a quick-study by probing the chromatic contours of Woody’s chart with the same abandon he applies to such standard material as the blues. Woody’s personal essay is intoned with a mellow burnished sound and is followed by searching explorations from Ronnie Mathews and Stafford James.

Dexter’s appreciative tribute to Fenja, his wife, inspires a thoughtful solo that carefully balances predictable and not so predictable elements. Our participation rests largely on the oscillation between our ability to anticipate and Dex’s ability to thwart those expectations with constantly fresh surprises. While a classic strategy, Dex manages the balancing act with an uncommon brilliance. Woody Shaw’s In Case You Haven’t Heard is a straightahead gritty line that evokes the darker tonalities of Dex’s tenor. Calling forth long arching figures and multi-note flurries, Dex works the great traditions of the tenor and reminds us of the influence he had on such titans as John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins.

It’s You Or No One sets the stage for the classic up-tempo Dex. Romping, stomping, spilling out perfectly etched phrases, Dex’s cornucopia is caught at harvest time. Ronnie Mathews’ Let’s Get Down is a jaunty bop-influenced line that places Dex at a leisurely pace. Never content with a mere walk, Dex mixes it up with a variety of skips, strolls and gallops. Monk‘s Round Midnight frames the tenorist’s broad-stroke style while Dex’s Backstairs is a swinging, free-blowing, up-tempo B- flat blues.

Aside from the tremendous accomplishments of Dex, a word about the contributions of the Woody Shaw-Louis Hayes band is in order. With saxophonist René McLean, the Shaw-Hayes quintet has emerged along with the groups of Ted Curson and Billy Harper as one of the outstanding proponents of the neo-bop approach. Here, they again demonstrate their special kind of intensity and cohesiveness. The rhythm section work of Mathews, James and Hayes is taut, alive and totally plugged into the shifting directions of the soloists. Then, when the spotlight turns their way, they each step forward to display the virtuosic musicality that has made the band one of the hot groups on the contemporary New York scene.

Homecoming is a celebration of the roots of jazz. It stands as a new plateau in Dex’s career and, for us, an opportunity to share in the workings of one of the great hearts and minds of improvised music.

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Liner Notes by Robert Palmer

The excitement Dexter Gordon created in New York in 1976 surprised almost everyone who was a part of it. The hard core jazz fans were startled when overflow crowds showed up for his engagements and cheered and pounded tables, serving notice that the saxophonist’s greatness would never again be the secret of a handful of connoisseurs. The new fans, who had read that Gordon was John Coltrane‘s initial inspiration or simply heard that he was worth hearing, discovered a master musician at the very pinnacle of his art. And Gordon himself discovered a new, young public ready to embrace his music and revere its creator, a public schooled in the intricacies of modem jazz and positively clamoring to hear it played by one of the greats. He had created a pleasant life for himself in Copenhagen, far from the clamorous, competitive antagonisms of the American jazz world as he left it in 1962, but this was something else!

After his first triumphant evening at the Storyville club, where he had to plead exhaustion at 3 am to avoid demands for an encore, and a second night playing for an audience which was even larger and more vociferous, Gordon began rehearsing for a week-long engagement at the Village Vanguard, a basement club where some of the greatest moments in modern jazz have occurred. Charles Mingus, the bassist and composer who had first played with Dexter in a high school jazz band, spent the afternoon at the Vanguard, looming over a table close to the bandstand and urging the saxophonest on with shouts and laughter. “Yeah, yeah,” he would exclaim whenever Gordon played a particularly felicitous phrase, “you’re gonna be teaching New York some stuff, man. Some lessons.”

After the rehearsal Dexter sat down to talk in the Vanguard’s dark crowded little kitchen. He was still elated by the ovations he had received at Storyville. “That was just overwhelming,” he said. “I’ve noticed that in Europe, where I live and work, there are a lot of new young fans, but I wasn’t prepared for this reception. What can I say? It made the heart glad.”

Listening to Gordon talk is not unlike hearing him play. His voice, like his sound on on the saxophone, is warm, self-assured deep, and resonant. He also has a way about hem, a certain magnetism. One might call it charisma, although these days charisma is often manufactured, and Dexter’s brand is natural and genuine. Perhaps one should simply say that he is a charmer in any event, as he was talking the Vanguard’s telephone rang, and since nobody on the club’s staff was about, he answered it. “Village Vanguard. No, it’s the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis band tonight. On Tuesday, Dexter Gordon. Who’s this? This is Dexter.” There was a long stretch during which the party on the other end talked and Dexter listened, his grin growing wider and sunnier by the second. “Why thank you sweetheart.” he finally said, as suavely as a king acknowledging the adoration of his minions. “Yes, we’ll be here through Sunday.”

On the bandstand, Gordon’s royal savoir faire is even more evident. He is a striking looking man, tall and handsome with a smile bright enough to light a room. He announces tunes in a mellow, liquid bar tone, often quoting at length from the lyrics to a standard he is about to play. When he has finished a solo, he acknowledges applause by holding his tenor saxophone out in front of his abdomen parallel, to the floor, as if he is sharing the adulation with it. But of course Gordon’s playing is the most aristocratic thing about him. His sound is huge and encompassing, from his booming lower register all the way up to a rich falsetto range. He is a master of harmonic subtleties and a master of timing. He is a prankster who enjoys inserting little musical jokes – quotes from Santa Claus is Coming To Town or Here Comes The Bride – into the most passionate improvisations. Above all, he is an architect of sound. His choruses have an ineluctable solidity to them. They are balanced and logical, classical, really, in the best sense of the word. The individual phrases are handsomely blocked out and warmly inflected, but ultimately the stones told by choruses and entire solos are even more impressive.

Gordon’s music is rooted in the creative ferment of the mid-1940’s, when modern jazz erupted onto the scene and brought the swing era to an end. He was born Dexter Keith Gordon in Los Angeles on February 27, 1923 and his father, a doctor who treated Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, made sure he heard plenty of jazz. He was impressed by Lester Young, the most progressive tenor saxophonist of the late swing era, and then by Charlie Parker, the fountainhead of the emerging modern jazz movement. As early as 1945, when he began making records under his own name, he had his own style together. It was really the first saxophone style to synthesize the towering influences of Young and Parker, and as a style in its own right influenced just about every musician who subsequently took up the tenor saxophone, not to mention players on other instruments. Among the saxophonists most heavily indebted to Gordon’s breakthroughs were Sonny Rollins and, especially, John Coltrane.

Unlike many of the musicians of his era, Gordon has not stopped developing. The records he made in the 1960’s for Blue Note are an advance on his original Savoy sides from the 1940’s, and since he moved to Europe he has developed even more. “Of all the people of his generation,” says Michael Cuscuna, who produced this album. “Dexter has stayed youngest. He is the most modern player to have come out of that period. He influenced Rollins and Coltrane and then, when they became more advanced, he learned from them. He’s still learning and still growing. This album is a testament to the veracity of that statement.”

After his initial week at the Village Vanguard, Dexter went out on the road, with the Woody Shaw–Louis Hayes group backing him. By the time he returned to the Vanguard to fulfill demands for another week – the club had been packed the first week, with lines of people snaking up the stairs and into the street – more people had heard about him and the lines were even longer. Fans would wait for hours, until offer listeners dragged themselves home and there was room for them to hear the last set of the night. They rubbed shoulders with a remarkable collection of musicians, who between them made up a very discriminating audience. Squeezing into the club on various nights of Gordon’s second week, the week when these recordings were made, were Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, John McLaughlin, Art Blakey, Jimmy and Percy Heath, Yusef Lateef, Jimmy Owens, Horace Silver, Cedar Walton, Stanley Turrentine, Barry Altschul, Julius Hemphill, Billy Higgins, and Dave Liebman, among many others. Phoebe Snow came, heard a single Gordon ballad solo, and was moved to tears.

With the roadwork behind them, the quintet you hear here was able to present a varied program. Shaw, who made his professional debut with the late Eric Dolphy and has always shown a penchant for the jazz style associated with John Coltrane, contributed two tunes: Little Red’s Fantasy and In Case You Haven’t Heard, which bring out the very modern side of Dexter Gordon. The wonderfully bright It’s You Or No One and the Thelonious Monk gem Round Midnight are distilations of Gordon’s classicism, while the album’s opener, Gingerbread Boy, and closer, Backstairs, portray the saxophonist’s prowess in the twelve-bar blues form. Fenja, which Dexter wrote for his wife, has chorus after chorus of warm, lyrical invention by the saxophonist, and then Shaw scoots in with a skittering ascending phrase that seems to be saying, “don’t forget. I’m here too.” Ronnie Mathews, whose sturdy chording and fleet solos are highlights of the set. contributed the medium uptempo burner Let’s Get Down. Throughout the proceedings, bassist Stafford James and Woody’s co-leader Louis Hayes provide a wonderfully fluid drive.

The group chemistry is exceptional. The Shaw-Hayes quintet, with René McLean on saxophones, is probably the most lively and imposing small group playing straight-ahead modem jazz in New York, and with Gordon at the helm it is an even more remarkable unit, spanning an unusually broad stylistic range with an unusual combination of elegance and urgency. Still, this album is really Dexter Gordon’s show, and what an impressive, inspiring show it is.

AUTHOR’S NOTE Listeners who are interested in a more detailed exegesis of Dexter Gordon’s life and music should refer to Ira Gitler’s Jazz Masters of the Forties (MacMillan) and to Dan Morgenstern’s essay accompanying the album Long Tall Dexter (Savoy SJL 2211), an essential compilation for any Gordon fan.

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