JAZZ A LA MODE

Dexter Gordon vies with Duke Ellington as the most charismatic jazz artist I’ve ever seen in person. His horn shook with the same swagger as the Los Angeles native’s 6’5″ gait, and good looks landed him occasional acting roles that culminated in his portrayal of Dale Turner in the movie ‘Round Midnight.

I had the pleasure of seeing Tommy Flanagan several times in the 1980s and ’90s at clubs in Hartford, Cambridge, and at the Village Vanguard, his home base in New York. When I introduced him at the Litchfield Jazz Festival in 1998, I mentioned that he’d played on landmark recordings by Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Wes Montgomery. Tommy took the mic and said, “That’s true, but they made all the money!”

Billie Holiday and Ben Webster were lovers for a brief stretch in the mid-’30s. A classic photograph taken by the Danish jazz fan Timme Rosenkrantz behind the Apollo in 1935 pictures them together, but in between the playful pettin’ and pokin’, there was at least one instance of the brutality that occurred all too often in Billie’s life.

With all due respect to the great records he made as a leader, whenever Duke Jordan comes to mind, I think first of the intro he played on Charlie Parker’s “Embraceable You.”

Mark Murphy died on October 22 at the age of 83. Born March 14, 1932 to a musical family in Syracuse (one with deep roots in my hometown of Worcester), he seemed to dig and draw on everything he’d ever heard, from opera to show tunes; classic blues to r&b; scat to vocalese; bebop to bossa nova to the Beats.

Thank God, and Mr. and Mrs. David Cohn, for bringing Alvin Gilbert Cohn into the world 90 years ago today. It’s hard to measure the value of swing and soul, but I’m certain that jazz would feel considerably less buoyant and exciting if Al had never graced it with his musical ingenuity.

I remember just where I was when I first heard Swiss Movement, the concert album by Les McCann and Eddie Harris recorded at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival. I was with a group of friends, mostly high school classmates, and we were skipping school.

The birthdays of two of the most soulful alto saxophonists of all time bookend the weekend. Friday was Houston native Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s 98th; Monday is the 81st of Memphis-born Hank Crawford.

Lalama was born into a musical family in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, 65 years ago today. He told All About Jazz that his mother was a professional singer who performed until she was eight months pregnant with him. “I was in her womb hearing these tunes live on the stage. I was hearing that vibration. It happened naturally…the…Songbook…is in my blood.”

Sir Charles Thompson died on June 16 near Tokyo, where he’d lived since 2002. He was 98, and was playing gigs up until a few years ago when he became ill with colon cancer.