Tenor saxophone battles originated at Minton's Playhouse jam sessions in Harlem in the early 1940s and soon became common at clubs on Central Avenue in Los Angeles. Famed tenor sax pairings include ...

This is FRESH AIR. The late saxophonist Dexter Gordon is the subject of a new biography written by his wife Maxine Gordon. Dexter Gordon was a bebop prodigy in the 1940s, was sidelined by drugs in the ...

Maxine Gordon made a single promise to her late husband. “I knew I didn’t want to write a linear jazz biography. That was very important to me, to make a nonlinear narrative, because jazz is not a ...

Set in 1959 and loosely based on the relationship between Parisian jazz fan Francis Paudras and Bud Powell, Round Midnight is maybe the greatest of all films about jazz. Real life saxophone legend ...

Dexter Gordon was a remarkable tenor saxophonist. A towering, dashing figure with an embracing smile and a wry sense of humor, Gordon was a powerful player whose bebop approach was equally assertive ...

It would be hard to find a better protagonist than jazz tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who died in 1990, and whose blowsy, ballroom-sized tone and seemingly bottomless melodic wit are beloved by ...

To drive out of the city of Ithaca in Upstate New York in October you need music. The hills are just beginning to show the golds, reds and rusts of autumn. The sumptuous melancholy of the season needs ...

Dexter Gordon, the seminal tenor saxophonist of the bop movement, remained largely in the same framework of musical ideas from early in his career to his last recordings. Gordon, who was born in 1923, ...

Dexter Gordon’s career as a jazz saxophonist began in the early ’40s playing with such greats as Nat King Cole, Lionel Hampton, and Dizzy Gillespie, but most of his following decade was derailed by ...