Dexter Gordon - Go! (Blue Note 85 Limited Edition Blue Vinyl LP)

Dexter Gordon - Go! | Vinyl LP - Blue Note 85 Limited Edition Reissue (BST 84112, blue vinyl)

Dexter Gordon was among the first tenor saxophonists to play bebop. He'd worked in Lionel Hampton's band at 17, recorded with Dizzy Gillespie and Wardell Gray through the 1940s, and then spent most of the 1950s out of action. When he signed with Blue Note in 1961, the comeback run that followed produced eleven sessions in four years, and the pair recorded on a single Monday in August 1962, Go! and A Swingin' Affair, are the ones most often cited as his best. Sonny Clark plays piano. Clark had recorded Cool Struttin' for Blue Note four years earlier and was a regular on the label's session roster, and his playing here has the same unhurried quality it had on that earlier album. Butch Warren plays bass and Billy Higgins plays drums, completing a rhythm section that sounds, as Ira Gitler wrote in the original liner notes, as if they were playing a nightclub gig rather than a studio session. The repertoire splits between Gordon's original "Cheese Cake," a boogaloo-era piece that became a standard, two big band numbers ("Second Balcony Jump" from the Billy Eckstine orchestra and "Three O'Clock In The Morning") and three ballads and standards including Cole Porter's "Love For Sale." Gordon was famous for reciting a song's lyrics to himself before playing, and on the ballad "I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out To Dry" and "Where Are You" you can hear that approach in how his phrases follow the cadence of the words.

This is the Blue Note 85 limited edition reissue (BST 84112 / 6511733), pressed on blue vinyl at Optimal Media using Kevin Gray's mastering from the Classic Vinyl Series.