LT-1051

Dexter Gordon - Landslide

Released - 1980

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, May 9, 1961
Dexter Gordon, tenor sax; Kenny Drew, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums.

tk.4 Landslide

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, May 5, 1962
Tommy Turrentine, trumpet; Dexter Gordon, tenor sax; Sir Charles Thompson, piano; Al Lucas, bass; Willie Bobo, drums.

tk.11 Serenade In Blue
tk.12 You Said It
tk.19 Love Locked Out

Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, June 25, 1962
Dave Burns, trumpet; Dexter Gordon, tenor sax; Sonny Clark, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Philly Joe Jones, drums.

tk.6 Blue Gardenia
tk.12 Second Balcony Jump
tk.21 Six Bits Jones

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Landslide	Dexter Gordon	May 9 1961
Love Locked Out	M. Kester-R. Noble	May 5 1962
You Said It	T. Turrentine	May 5 1962
Serenade In Blue	H. Warren-M. Gordon	May 5 1962
Side Two
Blue Gardenia	B. Russell-L. Lee	June 25 1962
Six Bits Jones	Dexter Gordon	June 25 1962
Second Balcony Jump	B. Eckstine-G. Valentine	June 25 1962

Liner Notes

DEXTER GORDON: LANDSLIDE

Dexter Gordon is a weaver of spells and teller of tales. He begins weaving his spell even before he's played a note, with his radiant, room-lighting smile, his velvety speaking voice, and the sheer magnetism of his presence. In interviews, he's often stressed his interest in musical storytelling. He once explained his infatuation with the playing of Lester Young by asserting that "Pres was the first to tell a story on the horn," and of the trumpeter Roy Eldridge he remarked, "I used to get the same thing listening to Roy as I did listening to Lester — the same 'story' feeling."

"Telling a story" is such a cliché of "jazz talk" that one rarely thinks about what it really means. On one level, it's a survival of an attitude common in blues, in which the guitar or harmonjca often "talk back to" the singer, or answer his vocal lines, and that attitude in turn is a survival of the close connections between music and speech found in many African cultures. Among the many African peoples who speak pitch-tone languages, a musical phrase may literally tell a story; It may have a verbal meaning, which most listeners can easily decipher its pitch configuration. There's a great deal of this marvellous tale-telling quality in Dexter Gordon's playing. He's an unusually expressive saxophonist, and often he quotes the lyrics to a standard before improvising on it, drawing an explicit connection between the import of the words and how he will shape and develop his musical ideas.

Jazz improvising is a "language" in another and equally interesting sense. A musician who develops his art in the way Dexter did — studying harmony and theory initially, picking up pointers from older musicians while serving an apprenticeship doing big band section work, listening to the idiom's recorded masterpieces and studying their details and construction — eventually creates his own individual style out of these diverse influences and experiences. But the original influences are never entirely subsumed in an individual's particular stylistic synthesis. A musician will retain phrases, personal timbres, and even entire solos associated with the many players he's listened to somewhere in the recesses of his memory, just as he retains the meolodies and chordal layouts of a number of standard tunes and jazz compositions. In the course of an improvisation, which is a kind of spontaneous composition using a prearranged framework, the musician will draw on the information he has filed another player, what he's actually hearing are either ideas found in the work of the other player or the improviser's personal but still recognizable transformation of those ideas. In this sense, a superior, seasoned jazz improviser "tells a story" every time he solos, a story of the music's rich traditions and of his own encounters with the bearers of these traditions.

There's an interesting example of this aspect of Dexter's story telling on 'Love Locked Out," the second of seven previously unreleased performances on this welcome new album. Gordon has never been thought of as a Coleman Hawkins disciple. He himself says that he loved Lester Young's playing more than that of any other tenor saxophonist, and of course his style was shaped further by Charlie Parker and the advent of bebop; he was the first really authoritative bop tenor stylist. But as we've noted, a jazz musician absorbs and retains something from just about everything he hears, and like any other young saxophonist of his era Gordon listened carefully to Coleman Hawkins, the undisputed tenor boss before Lester Young's arrival and a major architect of jazz ballad playing. Hawk's way with a ballad entailed various combinations of warm melodic exposition with arpeggiated playing; he would "spread" a chord by stating its notes in sequence, almost as one might do when practicing an instrumental exercise. In his ballad performance "Love Locked Out," Dexter begins with a very straightforward melodic exposition, employing a plaintive, veiled sound, and then, as he begins to develop the melody, he works his way through a succession of arpeggiated phrases, clearly acknowledging Hawkins's contribution to ballad playing and to his own evolution.

I've emphasized this aspect of Dexter Gordon's music because Landslide, drawn from three different 1961-62 sessions, gives a particularly good account of it. When Dexter is at work, he seems to access the material in his memory bank very directly, so that his playing reflects with unusual honesty the mood he's in at the moment. I've heard him, for example, quote a single fragment — "Here Comes the Bride," say — two or three times in the course of a single evening, and returned the following night to find him in a very different frame of mind. For this reason, Dexter Gordon albums drawn from a single session tend to have a unity of mood, to present their own distinct perspective on the Gordon style. This album has more variety Gordon is caught on three different days, telling different kinds of stories.

The early sixties must have been an uneven period for Gordon emotionally. After establishing himself as a modern master in New York during the forties, he spent much of the fifties back in his native California, where he had to overcome both a drug habit and the indifference of a jazz public that was preoccupied with the so-called "cool school." He returned to New York in the early sixties to record some of the finest albums of his career for Blue Note; "Landslide," written by Dexter with fellow tenor saxophonist Harold Land in mind, is an unreleased tune cut at the session for the second of these albums, Dexter Calling. Making these albums, after having recorded very sporadically for a decade, must have been extremely satisfying, and in concert and at occasional night club appearances Dexter was very warmly received. But the cabaret card law, which forced entertainers working in places that served liquor to apply for cards and routinely denied cards to anyone who had been in trouble with the law, especially on drug-related charges, kept Dexter from working steadily. In the study of Gordon included in Jazz Masters of the Forties, Ira Gitler suggests that Dexter's failure to obtain a cabaret card was one of the main reasons he left for Europe later in 1962 and decided to stay there.

After the exuberant, hard-toned tenor solo on "Landslide," the saxophonist's work on the next three numbers sounds somewhat subdued. In part this difference can be ascribed to the difference in the accompanying groups. "Landslide" features the extroverted rhythm section of Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. On "Love Locked Out," "You Said It," and "Serenade In Blue," Willie Bobo, better known as a conga player, is on trap drums; Bobo also played traps on Blue Note sessions by Grant Green and the much underrated tenor saxophonist Ike Quebec during this period. Sir Charles Thompson, who now lives and works in Switzerland, had appeared on several Blue Note sessions during the forties and returned to the studio to record for the label on a 1959 Ike Quebec date. Together with bassist Al Lucas, Bobo and Thompson provided spare backing on this date, and on the two ballads Dexter played gently and sadly, with deep feeling. "You Said It," a Tommy Turrentine composition recorded several months later by the trumpeter's brother Stanley and available on Jubilee Shouts (Blue Note BN LA 883), is more "up." Dexter's solo begins with tumbling strains that cascade downward, pulling at times against the forward push of the rhythm, and then opens out into some expansive, intelligent eighth-note patterns. The tune's composer, making his only appearance of the set, solos briefly, and Thompson's solo includes reminders of both Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk.

The second side of the album features a really exemplary rhythm section. The enlivening Philly Joe Jones is back on drums, the estimable Sonny Clark is the pianist, and Ron Carter's bass provides a big, hard bottom. Dave Burns, the trumpeter, had been featured on three earlier Blue Note sessions — James Moody in 1948, George Wallington in 1954, Leo Parker in 1961. A veteran of the early Dizzy Gillespie big bands, he's an individual, assured player, and this date provides a welcome chance to hear him improvise at some length. The material is varied and cleverly arranged, and Dexter plays with a tougher tone and more aggressive attack than on the previous session. "Blue Gardenia" sounds like a small-band version of a big band arrangement, with its harmonized verses and unison bridge. "Six Bits Jones" is in 6/8, although the way Philly Joe accents it makes it sound almost like a straight waltz at times. Here Dexter echoes Burns's theme statements of the minor-key melody in chase fashion before jumping into the first solo, one of his best of the album. The way he cuts across the bar lines, building his improvisation out of chunky phrases of unequal lengths and making good use of his lower, buzz-saw register, is a delight. "Second Balcony Jump" was recorded by Dexter again two months after this session and issued on his classic Go (Blue Note BST 84112). But this version doesn't take a back seat to the later one. Dexter's sound is scorching, and he swaggers through his solo, scatteing blues riffs, downturned inflections, jagged runs, and bottom-of-the-horn honks, Yeah! Here Dexter isn't just telling a story, he's preaching it, weaving that almost mystical spell of his. This performance alone is worth the price of admission. It's our great good fortune that Gordon decided to return from Europe, after a decade in exile, so that we could hear more like it.

—Robert Palmer