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Dexter Gordon blew blue
blue notes for hours in his visit
to my CD player,
accompanied by wicked syncopations
rapped on window and roof
by bursts of rain as it came and went
April 3rd, 2024
In this edition of photographs and stories from Mr. Oakland’s book, Dexter Gordon, Art Farmer and Johnny Griffin are featured.
...July 21st, 2020
“Charles Ingham’s Jazz Narratives” connect time, place, and subject in a way that ultimately allows the viewer a unique way of experiencing jazz history. This edition’s narratives are “The Entrance of Bessie Smith into San Diego”, “Lionel Hampton Is Coming to Dinner at Dr. Gordon’s House”, and
“Lionel Hampton: Central Avenue Breakdown”
June 15th, 2020
Mosaic Records co-founder Michael Cuscuna shares news concerning the availability of previously unreleased photographs of Blue Note Records sessions taken by Francis Wolff
...August 8th, 2019
Maxine Gordon, author of Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon, discusses her late husband’s complex, fascinating life.
...April 11th, 2019
In this edition, Dexter Gordon tells the story of joining Louis Armstrong’s band in 1944, and how they enjoyed their intermission time.
...April 2nd, 2019
I will soon be interviewing Ms. Maxine Gordon, author of Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon, whose biography of her late husband is a creatively and beautifully told account of the essential mid-20th century saxophonist.
...January 22nd, 2019
She stood in a room at The Met glancing at the painting on the wall, which was of two women kissing. From her vantage point, standing slightly away and to the side, the two women lying together interlocked in bed appeared cushioned awkwardly in space, free-floating yet connected.
The painting was by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, the alcoholic French dwarf artist, and she tried to imagine what it was like living when he did in Paris at the time of the painting, 1892, and what it might have been like for these two prostitutes and others like them who often turned to one another for relief from a world of men then.
Mireille, it was reported, was one of the girls in the brothel in the Rue d’Amboise, when Lautrec was commissioned to create a series of panels about the lives of the girls there, and she was one of his favorites. He visited the salons of the brothels in the Rue des Moulins and Rue d’Amboise many times to study and paint the women, who felt very free to be
...February 2nd, 2016
the pain contained within those
seemingly effortless sounds
lifts us from our couches
to applaud years
after the event
the tone arches stretches slinks struts
leaps to fence tops and deftly prances
December 18th, 2015
This west coast-based musician was a hot tenor of the forties who appeared in many of the top jam sessions during his era, including “The Duel,” with Dexter Gordon. Who was he?
Wardell Gray
Jimmy Giuffre
Buddy Collette
Bob Cooper
Teddy Edwards
Richie Kamucka
Zoot Sims
Lucky Thompson
...December 23rd, 2013
TATTOO
featuring Dexter Gordon
by Michael Harper
Though a simple rose under your skin
I look up the bugle ritual of recall
for sailors to regroup — soldiers at parade rest
and your sister who could not read as a child
April 25th, 2007
For many of us, the photography of Herman Leonard is our first link to jazz culture. Ellington in Paris, Dexter with a Chesterfield, a youthful Miles, Satchmo in Birdland…These images, in some cases more so than the music, are responsible for our devotion to preserving and protecting the art the musicians of mid 20th Century America created, and Herman Leonard reported on.
...March 6th, 2000
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