I didn't know all this. Thanks, Bluesie.
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Paris Review on Sonny Clark...
"That same month, he cut two classic Blue Note albums under the leadership of saxophonist Dexter Gordon, Go and A Swinging Affair. When Clark died five months later, Gordon remembered these sessions in a letter to Blue Note impresarios Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff: Clark had “almost totally given up” on his life, Gordon wrote. Yet judging from the surviving albums, he still cooked on piano. Several of Clark’s solos are top notch, but in this rhythm section with Butch Warren on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, he conducts a clinic on how to play sensitive, sparkling piano accompaniment behind a soloing saxophonist, in this case the atmospheric Gordon. Clark didn’t appear to give up on anything musically. Many years later Gordon remembered Go as among his career favorites."Comment
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I really like Sonny Clark's piano playing and also think he was one of the best composers in the Hard Bop idiom. The tunes he wrote deserve to be better known. I have always thought that , had he lived, he would have become a cult figure in the jazz resurgence in the 1980s. His playing always strikes me as an economic version of Bud Powell with a wry sense of humour buried underneath. I wish that I had bought "A swinging affair." The other album "Go" is terrific and the version of the Jerry Valentine composition "Second Balcony Jump" tat was originally composed to Earl Hines big band makes me smile. Dexter was in that band too, for a while. During the mid 1940s, Hines' band was briefly a be-bop hot bed although the band with Parker and Gillespie never recorded commercially because of the recording ban. There are some boppish records after this point, shortly after which Hines disbanded.Comment
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Dexter Gordon with Freddie Hubbard, Horace Parlan, George Tucker & Al Harewood playing 'You've Changed' from the 1961 album 'Doin' Allright':
JRLast edited by Jazzrook; 12-05-20, 13:54.Comment
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