Dexter Gordon

At New York's Royal Roost. Herman Leonard, Photographer
Jazz: A History of America's Music; by Geoffrey C Ward and Ken Burns

NY Times
By: Peter Watrous
April 26, 1990

Dexter Gordon, one of the great tenor saxophonists and a charismatic figure in the jazz world, died of kidney failure yesterday at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. He was 67 years old, and had entered the hospital on March 18 for treatment of cancer of the larynx. He lived in New York City.

During the last seven years, Mr. Gordon, who began his music career in 1940 with Lionel Hampton's orchestra, was semiretired from music. Instead he had been making movies, starring in '' 'Round Midnight,'' Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 film about an expatriate jazz musician down on his luck in Paris. Mr. Gordon's performance in the role, which closely mirrored his own life, won him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.

He had recently finished filming ''Awakenings,'' with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, in which he was cast as a patient in a psychiatric ward.

But it is as a musician that Mr. Gordon will be remembered. With a huge hard tone and with ascetic pared-down lines, Mr. Gordon, one of the first tenor saxophonists to play be-bop, influenced countless musicians, including John Coltrane. Mr. Gordon's playing owed much of its spareness and clarity to the influence of the saxophonist Lester Young; he added the complexity of be-bop and a more muscular tone.

But while many be-bop musicians played improvisations that were detailed and embroidered, Mr. Gordon's playing was plain and smooth, like polished marble. His music had humor. He was a master of the musical quotation, and he would often insert a funny aside into an improvisation as comic relief.

Studying the Clarinet

Mr. Gordon was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 27, 1923. He began studying the clarinet when he was 13, and was soon performing with other young local musicians, including Charles Mingus and Buddy Collette.

During World War II and immediately after, Los Angeles had a flourishing jazz scene based on Central Avenue, where celebrities and soldiers would mingle in the many clubs. Mr. Gordon was a major figure there, playing saxophone with the best of the musicians, among them Sonny Criss, Benny Bailey, Art Farmer, Hampton Hawes, Carl Perkins, Larry Marable and Leroy Vinnegar.

Though his first professional job, with Lionel Hampton's band, kept him on the road for the first three years of the 1940's, Mr. Gordon regularly returned to Los Angeles.

In 1943, Mr. Gordon made his first recordings as a band leader. A year later, after working with Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, he joined the Billy Eckstine Orchestra. It was with Mr. Eckstine that he first came to true national prominence.

Mr. Eckstine's orchestra was at the vanguard of jazz; Dizzy Gillespie was its musical director, and Charlie Parker, Gene Ammons and Mr. Gordon were in the reed section, while Sarah Vaughan played piano and sang with Mr. Eckstine. It was a band that young musicians looked to for new musical directions.

'He Was an Innovator'

''Coming up as a kid interested in new sounds, we all would listen to Billy Eckstine because it was an all-star band,'' the saxophonist Johnny Griffin recalled yesterday from Chicago. ''I was playing like Ben Webster, but then I heard Dexter. He was an innovator. Lester Young was his god, but out of Lester he fashioned something that everybody copied. He had his own sound, which all great musicians have. Dexter had a way of articulating that was his own. There were few musicians who had such a big sound.''

During the late 1940's and early 50's, Mr. Gordon staged epic tenor duels with another great West Coast saxophonist, Wardell Gray. And he recorded be-bop classics, including ''Bikini Blues'' in 1947, for the Dial label in Los Angeles. But by the mid-1950's, Mr. Gordon was a heroin addict and spent time in prison. By the 1960's, like many of his be-bop confederates, Mr. Gordon moved to Europe, first to Paris and then to Copenhagen.

In Paris, he lived in a hotel in the red light district, with Mr. Griffin and the drummer Art Taylor. They lived next door to the French jazz patron Francis Paudras, who was taking care of the ailing pianist Bud Powell.

''Dexter was a sweetheart,'' Mr. Taylor said yesterday in an interview in New York. ''He was the first really modern tenor saxophonist. We had wonderful times. Dexter used to take me out to dinner, and we would eat two or three dozen oysters, go to fine restaurants and just enjoy the food.''

Mr. Griffin said yesterday: ''Dexter was a showoff. He was always funny and had a lot of wit. He was extremely well read.''

A Return to Glory

During his years abroad, Mr. Gordon's career in the United States evaporated, even though he continued making a series of brilliant records for the Blue Note label, starting in 1961 and ending in 1965. In Europe, he continued to regularly perform, teach and record.

In 1976, he tried making a comeback in New York City; his show, at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village, won him great acclaim. A year later, Mr. Gordon returned to live in the United States, remaking his reputation with a series of incendiary shows in which he played as well as ever. He had incorporated much of the modern harmony of the 1960's in his improvisations, and his performances were notable for the euphoria he could create.

Mr. Gordon is survived by his wife, Maxine, of New York; two daughters, Robin and Deirdre Gordon, of Los Angeles, and three sons, Mikael Solfors of Sweden, Benjamin Gordon of Denmark, and Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw of New York.