Music Monday: 1962 and 1967

Dexter Gordon’s Go was an early favorite of mine probably as much because of its striking album cover (featuring Jackson Burke’s Trade Gothic Extended) as Dexter Gordon’s compelling hard bop sax easily complemented by Sonny Clark’s piano, Butch Warren on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums. 

I got to thinking about this album this week, in part, because I’ve also been playing Miles Davis’s Sorcerer. Recorded five years later, except for the last track “Nothing Like You” which was recorded in 1962 mere weeks after Go. I’ve always disliked this Gil Evans-arranged track and wondered why it was included on this album. Of course, saying a Dexter Gordon album from 1962 is different from a Miles Davis album from 1967 is about like saying blue is different from red, but listening to these two albums back-to-back remains an entertaining way to think about how vibrant jazz music was in the mid-1960s. 

To return to the theme of 1962, I’ve been listening to two other albums from that year. First, Bill Evans’s and Jim Hall’s Undercurrent which like Go, first grabbed my owing to its album cover with its striking Toni Frissell photograph,”Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida.” It’s just piano and guitar and it gets better the more I listen to it.

Next, I listened to Sonny Rollins’s album The Bridge (1962) with Rollins on tenor and Jim Hall again on guitar as well as Bob Cranshaw on bass and Ben Riley on drums.

It was good listening on a snowy weekend.