Long Tall Dexter

Happy 100th to one of the all-time greats, and not just as a movie star.

Today is Dexter Gordon’s centenary, the great Long Tall Dexter. He is one of the greatest of all jazz musicians, but somehow comes off as under-appreciated. He’s always been popular with the general jazz public, and he’s received plenty of critical acclaim, but the impression I get after decades of following him is that his place in jazz history is strangely obscure, that he’s seen as a great musician whom people (including critics) dig, but kind of an outlier, someone who did his thing but left no enduring trace after he passed, no legacy other than his albums. Out of the constant flow of generations of the music, his existence is static, encoded on discs but not living on in other musicians.

Tune in to WKCR for their 24 hour Dexter Gordon birthday broadcast. I don’t know if this is still true, but up to at least five years ago, the one album the station had played more than any other in their history was Go!

This is strange to me, personally and critically. For the former, I admit a deep bias—Dexter Gordon is the single most important jazz musician to me, it was hearing his album Manhattan Symphonie when I was a teenager that made me want to play jazz. Not generally regarded as even one of Gordon’s own classic albums—the consensus pick seems to be Go!—it is in my opinion one of the great albums in the entire history of the music. The thing that was always uncanny to me is that from the very first track (it opens with a ballad, “As Time Goes By”) it seems like Gordon is talking to me, that words are coming out of the bell of his tenor saxophone.