BLP 4146

Dexter Gordon - Our Man in Paris

Released - November 1963

Recording and Session Information

CBS Studios, Paris, France, May 23, 1963
Dexter Gordon, tenor sax; Bud Powell, piano; Pierre Michelot, bass; Kenny Clarke, drums; Francis Wolff, producer.

tk.1 A Night In Tunisia
tk.3 Scrapple From The Apple
tk.4 Broadway
tk.5 Stairway To The Stars
tk.8 Willow Weep For Me

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Scrapple From The Apple	Charlie Parker	23 May 1963
Willow Weep For Me	Ann Ronell	23 May 1963
Side Two
Broadway	Woods, McCrae, Bird	23 May 1963
Stairway To The Stars	Signorelli, Malneck, Parish	23 May 1963
A Night In Tunisia	Gillespie, Robin	23 May 1963

Liner Notes

THE renascence of Dexter Gordon has been one of the most sanguine events in recent jazz history. After a brilliant early career with Lionel Hampton, the Billy Eckstine big band and Charlie Parker, the tall, forty-year old Californian slid into limbo during most of the 1950’s. It was known that he was in California, but he had ceased to be a presence on the jazz scene. Musicians remembered him — as is indicated by his influence on the evolving styles in those years of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane — but most of the jazz public and the critics had either forgotten Gordon or assumed that his career had evaporated. As British critic Daniel Halperin noted when the resurgent Dexter played London in 1962, the second career of Gordon “has been an unusual transformation because usually, on the jazz scene, when they fade away they hardly ever come back. And there was a time when...Dexter Gordon was definitely near vanishing point.”

The road back started in 1960 when Dexter Gordon wrote the music for and performed in the west coast edition of Jack Gelber’s The Connection. The next year, Alfred Lion of Blue Note invited Dexter to return to New York for recordings. The albums since — Doin’ All Right (Blue Note 4077) , Dexter Calling (Blue Note 4083 ), Go! (Blue Note 4112) — have firmly re-established Gordon as a major voice in jazz.

Dexter is now based in Paris, where this album was recorded in May, 1963. Shortly after the session was made, Dexter was asked by a reporter for the French monthly, Jazz, whether he thought he was playing better today than at previous stages in his career. “Certainly,” Dexter answered. “I’m much more lucid and have a stronger sense of equilibrium. My musical conception is much surer. I know where I‘m going now. I am just as spontaneous as I used to be, but I know much more about music. I’ve traveled a long road in jazz . . . I can’t regain the time I’ve lost, but I’ve learned from the experience and it’s not impossible to shape a future which will have profited from the time that was lost.”

Dexter was once asked, "What would you like most to see printed behind your name?” His answer was: “I’d like to see something about the fact that I'm constantly searching for ways to improve.” The persistence of that search has been evident in all of his recent Blue Note recordings, including this one. Alan Beckett, a critic for the British Jazz Journal, observed during a Gordon stay in London in 1962: “As one of the first musicians to make constructive adaptations of Parker’s harmonic developments to the tenor saxophone, and as one of the greatest influences upon many of the most productive musicians in contemporary jazz, his historical importance is very great. But he is not only a link, and although his recent records indicate that he has borrowed to some extent from his own disciples, his playing over here show him to be a mature and consolidated stylist, from whose work great satisfaction can be derived.

In this Paris album, Dexter’s colleagues have a long history as a unit in that city. Kenny Clarke, the key initial shaper of modern jazz drumming, has been an expatriate in Paris since 1956. Bud Powell has lived there since 1959. Pierre Michelot is one of the most respected bassists in Europe, and he has worked and recorded with a wide range of visiting American jazzmen — among them, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. In 1959, Clarke, Powell and Michelot formed a trio, the Three Bosses which worked together for a long time. This, therefore, is not a date with a pick-up rhythm section. Dexter is heard here in the context of a rhythm team which long ago learned to fuse each of its elements into a flowing unified whole.

From the start of Scrapple From The Apple, the slicer strength, the virility of Gordon’s horn is unquenchably evident. His tone is assertive but warm; his beat is enveloping; and his conception indicates, as French writer Demèire Loakimidis notes, that “Gordon has always emphasized swing and melodic development” in his playing. Now, however, there is increased, irrepressible confidence and more venturesome and diversified use of pitch and texture as expressive devices. Furthermore, he sets up and sustains a momentum in a performance such as Scrapple From The Apple that is fiercely, contagiously exciting. There are no hesitations, no skating on technical runs while ideas are being regrouped. Dexter plays as if he could hardly contain all he wants to say. Beneath the marked power, there is also the surge of even more latent force. But Powell’s solo is fluent and well-organized, confirming a recent report by “Cannonball” Adderley that Bud, when be is stimulated by his musical surroundings, remains an absorbing pianist.

Willow Weep For Me illustrates what Alan Beckett has called Gordon’s “gruff lyricism.” In this performance, moreover, that lyricism is unusually incisive. This could be termed a dramatic reading of the ballad. There is no flaccidity in Gordon’s ballad work. It contains as much surging strength as do his up tempo swingers, but the strength is disciplined into spare, penetratingly lucid patterns. The overall shape of Gordon’s solo is remarkably cohesive, a further indication that while Gordon remains as spontaneous as ever, the increased emotional maturity and musical acumen of the added years have channeled that spontaneity into more memorable and more substantial shapes. There is also much more of a speech-like quality to his phrasing. This is not simply an exercise in technical fluency. Dexter’s interpretation of Willow Weep For Me is in time vintage jazz tradition of telling a striking, personal story. The same is true of Bud Powell’s statement which is also spare and tensile. Michelot has matured from his earlier recordings, and his solo in Willow Weep For Me is deep-toned, cleanly executed and imaginative.

Broadway, once a vehicle for Lester Young (the strongest early influence on Gordon’s playing) is an intriguing, concise history of one major trend in jazz tenor playing. There are traces of Lester as well as signs of the later Gordon style which affected Rollins and Coltrane. In addition, annealing all these cross-influences, is the present Gordon who has absorbed these elements, including what he has chosen to adapt from his disciples, into a powerfully individualistic way of expression. Again, as in Scrapple From The Apple, there is the overwhelming presence of the man — the climate of crackling emotional excitement which never lets up but rather increases iii intensity. Note too, in some of time exclamatory uses of pitch, how Gordon has found his own way into at least part of the terrain of the current jazz avant-garde. Throughout the track and the album, spurring the soloists and keeping the time crisply alive, is the superbly lithe drumming of Kenny Clarke. As for Bud, in addition to his own ebullient solo, listen to the echo of Count Basie he brings in at the close.

Stairway To The Stars is another aspect of Gordon’s balladry. A first gentler and more introspective than Willow Weep For Me, the performance reveals the warmth and depth of tone Gordon can draw from his horn. And yet, the spine of the interpretation remains steel-like. It is this quality — a firm sense of direction and what I referred to before as sheer strength of emotion — which most instantly identifies anything Gordon does. And as is also characteristic, there is the sure, judicious choice of notes. The lesson of economy was one of the most valuable Gordon learned from Lester Young, and it is a lesson to which he has returned during his current renascence. Bud Powell’s solo is almost song-like in its particular quality of lyricism and discloses an especially serene side of Powell’s current work.

The final A Night In Tunisia is a summation of the renewed Dexter Gordon — the soaring assurance, the delight in improvising, the unflagging resourcefulness and the bursting ardor of his attack. Gordon has said that he is happier now than he has ever been before, and those high spirits are pervasively clear in this album. It is a happiness, however, which is not likely to lead to coasting. At the core of Dexter’s commitment to music is a restless desire to learn and to express more of what he feels. As he told one British writer after having scored a notable triumph in London, “No, I'm not wholly satisfied at the moment; my career is just beginning.”

—NAT HENTOFF

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT OUR MAN IN PARIS

Our Man In Paris captures Dexter Gordon at one of several peaks in his storied career. He had arrived in Europe in the late summer of 1962, after a year of extensive recording for Blue Note that reestablished him among the leading tenor saxophonists and produced his consensus masterpiece, Go! Finding work more plentiful and social conditions more accommodating than in the U.S., he had chosen to remain on the continent, where he appeared frequently in the jazz clubs of Britain, France and Scandinavia. While never “based” in Paris as Nat Hentoff’s original notes indicate (Copenhagen was his longstanding European home between 1962 and ‘76), Gordon clearly found the City of Lights and its musical environment inspirational.

One reason was the knowledge that Paris was home to a rhythm section as illustrious as any to be found in the States. Virtually from the time of his own expatriation in 1959, Bud Powell had teamed with earlier arrival Kenny Clarke and native Pierre Michelot to form the Three Bosses. The trio appeared on its own as well as in support of numerous local and visiting stars, and was in the habit of accompanying such prominent tenor saxophonists as Don Byas, Zoot Sims, Lucky Thompson and Barney Wilen. (With Oscar Pettiford in place of Michelot, Powell and Clarke had also made memorable concert recordings with Coleman Hawkins.) The Bosses worked together frequently for four years and appear to have dissolved their partnership shortly after the present music was taped, with the Dizzy Gillespie/Double Six sessions held two months later for Phillips being their final visit to a studio.

The Bosses might never have joined forces with Dexter Gordon on this occasion if things had gone according to Blue Note’s original plans. Francis Wolff, Alfred Lion’s partner (and his successor as primary studio producer after Liberty Records acquired the label in 1966), traveled to Paris with the intention of taping Gordon and a rhythm section led by Kenny Drew in a program of new music by the saxophonist. When Drew was replaced by Powell, Wolff moved to Plan B. “We used standards,” he reported to Lion in a letter written the day after the session. “Dexter’s originals were not so good, besides Bud has great trouble learning new tunes.”

The substitute material presented Powell with no such problems. He had recorded both ballads and “A Night In Tunisia” in earlier trio versions, is documented on an air check playing “Scrapple From The Apple” with Charlie Parker, and like everyone who attended jam sessions in the ‘40s had to be on intimate terms with “Broadway.” Whether as a result of such familiarity or merely the luck of taping on one of the pianist’s good days, Powell’s soloing and comping is extremely strong and focused, minus the unchecked fury of his early work, yet still among the most lucid performances of his last years.

If the change in programming inhibited Gordon’s ability to fully express his current concepts on the tenor sax, ¡t is not apparent in the exceptional results. He slips harmonic ideas into the flow of his solos that underscore an affinity for Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, each of whom had attended to Gordon’s example in establishing his own influential concept on the horn. These echoes of his progeny are not cobbled-together contemporary effects, however, but rather part of the improvisational flow as apt as the riffs and quotes and climactic exclamations that had always comprised the Gordon style. “Scrapple From The Apple” is the most imposing example in a program filled with magnificent tenor saxophone playing. Kenny Clarke, perhaps the original “modern” fountainhead, is also at his best on this date, reacting to the soloists’ ideas without ever losing the swinging center of the beat. The cymbal sound that graced so many U.S. sessions before Clarke departed for France in 1956 is alive and well on these tracks.

The bonus performances were bookends to the recording session. “Our Love Is Here To Stay” opened the late-afternoon date with the full quartet, while a trio take of “Like Someone In Love” provided the coda around 9 pm. The latter performance originally saw release as part of a Powell collection of outtakes, then was reunited with the rest of this date when “Our Love” first appeared on the original CD reissue.

Despite Go! appearing to great acclaim earlier in 1963, and Our Man In Paris serving as an imposing sequel, Gordon did not seize the opportunity to enhance his profile by returning to the U.S. Except for occasional visits to his family in the following decade, he was to remain based in Europe until his “rediscovery” by American audiences in 1976 finally made Gordon a musical aristocrat in his homeland.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003