notes, Dexter morgan: serial killer

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Midway through his decade-long stint as Ella Fitzgerald’s pianist and musical director, Flanagan follows the leader’s sturdy arcs and planes with a graceful sketch. He was very urbane and appreciated the finer things in life, but he had a common touch with people—he got along with a whole spectrum. And one time when I was in Chicago, this guy had heard one of my records, and he said, ‘Yeah, man, you sound great; you sound like Dexter. moments; and Cannonball explores the lower depths of the alto with complete control, meeting the tenors on their own terms and adding something else.

Gordon responds in kind; playing with all the power and discursive invention he customarily brought to club sets, he projects a polish and concision apropos to a concert setting. Few jazz musicians have stamped the vocabulary of their instrument so definitively at such a tender age as Dexter Keith Gordon, who was not yet 22 when he recorded that iconic tenor battle with Gene Ammons. Leonard Feather and Shorty Rogers and all sorts of people were in the control room,” Banks told a reporter in Austin, Texas, his hometown, where he currently lives and plays. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Meditation” is Gordon’s second investigation of a bossa nova (first was “Morning of the Carnival” from the 1965 album Gettin’ Around )As Ira Gitler wrote on the liner notes for More Power, “Talk about creating a mood—Dex does it in all registers of the horn with a gorgeous sound and a feeling that envelops one with fireside warmth. Much of the jazz fraternity was plugging in—on the heels of Bitches Brew, Miles Davis was about to record Jack Johnson; Herbie Hancock had cut Mwandishi at the end of 1970; and Weather Report had recently recorded their first album—and it probably seemed like a good deal. While on the continent, he was in peak form and Gordon’s many SteepleChase recordings rank with the finest work of his career. Roberta Flack won the 1972 Grammy for Song of the Year and Album of the Year with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” and Gordon sticks close to the melody, again channeling the manly, warm mid-register voice that his fans could never get enough of. A staple of Gordon’s late Seventies repertoire, “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” does not appear in his discography until an October 1969 TV broadcast with the Oscar Peterson Trio.

Until his death in 1990, he gigged around the world on a regular basis with several top-shelf American quartets, made records with good budgets and adequate rehearsal time, and brilliantly portrayed the shambling, dissipated jazzman Dale Turner in Bertrand Tavernier’s film ́ Round Midnight. On various New York visits in ́41 and ́42, the aspirant heard trumpet modernists Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Harris, and Victor Coulson. Ammons starts slow, making each note count, belting out his phrases like a Kansas City blues shouter, moving into the upper register as he builds the dramatic arc of his testimony, quoting “Frankie and Johnny” back at his old partner. The surviving selections are a lively reprise of “The Chase,” Gordon’s notoriously popular 1947 tenor battle with Wardell Gray, and two versions of the popular Eckstine feature “Lonesome Lover Blues.Dexter’s approach changed in the late Sixties and early Seventies,” says Eric Alexander, an astute Gordon student from a later generation. Dexter said that the publicity about Louis being anti-bebop was way overstated, that Louis encouraged the young musicians. He was among the very first modern tenor players to break away from Pres, to start emphasizing minor IXs, major IXs, XIIIs, and flatted Vs. Fourteen years later, the pulse on this blues stomp shifts from mid tempo to a sleek up-medium, and Gordon devours the changes in his updated manner.