Music Monday: Brandee Younger, Chris Potter, and Long Tall Dexter

I had a bunch of grading to do this past week and a good bit of moderately tedious editorial work to do as well. This is not my favorite stuff to do but it is good for my music listening!

On my drive home a couple of weeks ago, after my night class, I had a chance to listen to Brandee Younger and Dezron Douglas performing live on my satellite radio jazz station.

I was transfixed! She was playing Alice Coltrane and some of her own compositions and it was simply amazing. The next day I cued up Force Majeure, a pandemic album from 2020 recorded into a single microphone in their apartment (and apparently part of a regular regular livestream! How did I not know about this?). It’s gorgeous and soulful and at times it even really stomps. A jazz harp album that STOMPS. 

Instead of linking to the album itself, here’s a video of a concert they recorded at Columbia in 2021. It communicates the spirit of Force Majeure, and you can see the two performing, which is nicer than staring at the record cover.

Last week, Chris Potter released a new live album Got the Keys to the Kingdom: Live at the Village Vanguard. He’s not someone who regular comes across my radar, for whatever reason. Maybe he just doesn’t play with people who I tend to listen to. That said, I did like the album he record with Dave Holland and Zakir Hussain called Good Hope that appeared in 2019.

Anyway, Got the Keys to the Kingdom is pretty good especially the opening track Mississippi Fred McDowel’s blues classic “You Gotta Move.”

Today would have been Dexter Gordon’s 100th birthday. I’ve long struggled to appreciate Long Tall Dexter partly because I was unsettled by its ambiguity. It seemed to me to bridge the chasm between bop and hard bop and modal jazz, and the latter generally feels like my happy place. Moreover, by the 1970s, he seems to have started to represent a kind of traditionalism movement in jazz which I imagined resisted jazz as a medium fortified by experimentation as much as improvisation.

That all said, I very much enjoy his early 1960s output and I’m dedicating this week to listening to some of his classics from that era.

It’s hard not to smile when listening to Gordon’s 1962 classic, Go (and to appreciate the Reid Miles clever design of the album cover and its use of Trade Gothic Extended!):

But my favorite album from that era is Our Man in Paris (1963) where Gordon plays with Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, and French bassist Pierre Michelot (who has some enjoyable moments on this album).

If that doesn’t set you up for a good week (or at least swinging one), I’m not sure what will!