Dexter Gordon
by Laurence O'Dwyer
[ people - december 05 ]
Dexter Gordon said that the best thing that ever happened to him was getting busted for possession of heroin - he spent three years in San Quentin, where he dried out and played saxophone every day. He hung his new compositions on the washing line along with the wet prison uniforms and played his score sitting on an upturned zinc bucket. In those three years he perfected his style and rarely felt unlucky.
After he was released he moved to Sweden to play in the new jazz clubs in Stockholm. Again, something fits in the story. The tall negro wandering through the ice streets and the neat trams gliding through the dark. The late night sessions were warm with whiskey and the band went home at dawn; their hoarse voices pluming around battered, polished instruments. He liked it there and it was a four more years before he moved to Paris.
Karen Norstadt, a Norwegian jazz singer, tells what it was like to work with Dexter Gordon. She loved him dearly, and her voice is filled with longing for those cold nights before he was famous.
”His lines were always graceful and understated. They could not be anything else. Nothing that is natural can perish.
”Once, he checked into a hotel room in Paris and went for a walk around the city. When it got late he turned around to go back and pick up his saxophone, but he had forgotten what hotel he had checked into.”
He never got that saxophone back, but it is an example of what is needed to play good jazz or to write good poetry.
