Dexter Gordon's Ballads

What is there to say about Dexter Gordon's ballads? During the two long winters I spent in Ithaca, New York, I would walk for hours listening to his "Ballads" on my headset: "Darn That Dream " "Don't Explain." "I'm A Fool to Want You." "Ernie's Tune." "You've Changed." "Willow Weep For Me." "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out To Dry." "Body and Soul." Most of the tunes were recorded between 1961 and 1964, and some appear on some of his other albums such as "Doin' All Right," but not in as beautiful an arrangement as here.

I fell in love with the hulking tenor sax player during what turned out to be for me an extraordinary period of musical appreciation, when I actually had time to listen to the music I loved, especially jazz. Shortly before he died, Dexter played the part of the amazing, lyrical, drunken sax player in the 1986 film set in Paris, "Round Midnight." Paris had been good to Dexter, as it was to many musicians, and Dexter's performance, which garnered him an Academy Award nomination, turned out to be a kind of homage to artists like Lester Young, and others like Bud Powell, who inspired him and with whom he had played.

I also tried to pay homage with a poem to the artist who brought so much tenderness and warmth into my life with his music:

Ballad to Dexter

Drunk with ballads and piano now
after a snowy walk past lamppost arms
and warm benches with their sleeping ghosts
all day a madman sits there
face red shivering in his thin black suit
and fallen socks
but now he's gone
I think i see his shadow there
drifting in the park
so full of silence you can hear it
as the cars shiver by
in the slow snow rain
and blue windows like a holy horn
pain a kind goodnight for somebody
somewhere

Smoke drifts over the sidewalk
with its lone scattered footprints
and i hear a voice inside
maybe dexter's say
don't go let it snow rain
watch it come down like
love it blows away
it flys too soon
but tonight it seems
inside this dusk
perfume these
wandering prints
will take me  home
no don't go
pretend you'll stay
pretend this all
won't go
won't go away.

(published in The Cafe Review, Winter '96 issue)