A Must-Read Book about Dexter Gordon

from the Amazon.com Web page for the book Sophisticated Giant

This past November, the University of California Press released the book Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon, written by Gordon’s widow, Maxine Gordon. As might be guessed, this is a highly personal account; and Gordon never tries to conceal her subjectivity. As a result, she makes the wise decision to begin with a brief account of how the book came to be.

During the last year’s of Dexter’s life, spent primarily in Cuernavaca, Mexico, he devoted much of his time to writing what amounted to his memoirs on ruled yellow legal pads. Maxine would then prepare typewritten versions of everything he wrote. This became a point of departure for her after Dexter’s death in 1990.

However, there were major gaps in what Dexter had written. Most of those gaps involved periods from his life that he simply did not wish to revisit, most of which involved drugs and prison. Rather than letting matters stand as Dexter had accounted for them, Maxine then set about to fill in those gaps. As a result, while her original intention was probably not to write a scholarly book about her second husband, accounting for the full span of Dexter’s life demanded that Maxine summon up a “personal toolbox” of first-rate research techniques.

Testimony to the success of her endeavor can be found in the book’s Afterword, written by her son from her first marriage, Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III. Bearing in mind that this is very much another instance of subjective writing, there is one sentence, which, in my opinion, cuts to the core of why the results of Maxine’s efforts amounted to a book that is very much worth reading:

I am very inspired by how deeply the soul of a woman on a mission to close the arc of her beloved husband’s autobiographical narrative was able to probe into the historical underworld of long-forgotten human memory, in order to excavate every last bit of truth-bearing authenticity and detail of what jazz truly is, and what it means at its deepest spiritual core—not just to us, but to those who actually created it, lived it, and died for it.

These may be the words of a loving son, but they can still be taken as a testament to the discipline behind Maxine’s efforts to provide a meaningful account of Dexter’s life.

This book is also useful for the way in which it establishes a context for the progress of the bebop movement and Dexter’s place in that “continuum” (a noun that shows up in a quote from Jimmy Heath that is a bit of a malapropism). Heath identifies Lester Young as the “source” of bebop practices, asserting that Charlie Parker began by learning some of Young’s solos. In this context, Dexter fits into the development of bebop on a par with Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell.

That context, in turn, provides an interesting perspective when one considers the narrative of Bertrand Tavernier’s film Round Midnight, in which Dexter played the leading role. His character, Dale Turner, was conceived as a composite of biographical elements drawn from both Young and Powell; and the film actually begins with the sound of Young’s voice from a tape recording of an interview conducted in Paris (where most of the film is set) by François Postif. (Both Postif and this detail seem to have been overlooked by Maxine’s scholarship, or she may have felt that they did not contribute to Dexter’s contributions to the film.)

Far more interesting was her observation that all of the jazz performances that were part of that film’s narrative were captured “live” by Tavernier’s camera work. At the end of the day, the film was more about how the practice of making jazz fit into the lives of the makers, creating Turner’s character as a sort of “universal prototype” for those makers. However, while Maxine is, on the whole, sanguine about both Tavernier’s methods and the results of the finished product, she leaves it to Michael Cuscuna, affiliated with Blue Note Records and co-founder of the archival Mosaic Records label, to account for a day on the set that did not go particularly smoothly.

Here are Cuscuna’s words as reproduced in the book:

So, at about this time, the real Francis Paudras comes in, and he’s standing in the back, watching. By now we’re about finished shooting, and everything else after that is going to be just audio recording. Everyone takes a long break, and all of a sudden Paudras comes up to François [Cluzet], and says, all in French—I’m just picking up bits of this—“Dirty motherfucker! You are not me! That’s not me! You’re not me!” and lunges at him. They start to throw punches. I don’t know most of what they are saying because it was all in French. A couple of guys from the crew pulled them apart. After that, Francis didn’t show up on the set again.

Speaking of Blue Note, Maxine’s account of the beginning of Dexter’s relationship with that label struck me as an unexpected twist. Here is her account of what Blue Note founder Alfred Lion said to Dexter prior to his first recording session with the label:

I don’t want any complicated music; but rather some good standards in medium, medium-bright and medium bounce tempos. I’d like to make something that can be enjoyed and played on jukeboxes stations in the soul spots throughout the nation.

I have to confess that, as one with a generous supply of Blue Note recordings (many in Mosaic collections), I found Lion’s conservative stance a bit surprising, particular in the context of Sophie Huber’s documentary, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes. Nevertheless, there is something somewhat “smoother” about the tracks for that first Blue Note session, particularly when compared with the Dial tracks (which include the give-and-take between Dexter and Wardell Gray on “The Chase”)!

These quotations should make it clear that Maxine never allows her own voice to dominate when another’s would be more appropriate. Indeed, at the very beginning of the book, she informs the reader that all passages taking from Dexter’s own handwritten notes will be reproduced accurately in italics. The result is thus a book of many voices, all of which are coordinated by Maxine’s keen sensitivity to the underlying narrative that allows the volume to rise to the highest standards of integrity.

Now I think it is time for me to go off an listen to some of Dexter’s tracks …