Dexter Gordon

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

What I’m doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word – I love it.

Music is a reservoir… of sounds.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition. If you don’t understand what it’s about, you’re depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.

Jazz is a beautiful word. I love it.

Jazz to me is a living music. It’s a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

[In 1972] At the moment, we’re getting the same thrill from seeing the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Jo Jo Gunne, and Judee Sill happen… It’s as hard to do it with Jackson Browne as it was to do it with Joni five years ago.

I’m now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

It became a kind of a game, to remember the things that had happened five minutes ago. I would start making notes about the things I was doing, on an instrument that was foreign to me, the guitar, so it was just a fun way of doing cognitive therapy. I was none the wiser to it until I began to improve and my ability to speak began to come back.

You blows who you is.

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I’m trying to do more. When I’m singing, I don’t want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling.

Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

The English pianist Alan Clare was once intrigued with a workman who was carrying out some remodeling inside his house. Clare was playing some recordings, and he began to notice that the workman was whistling along with whatever music he put on – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, it didn’t seem to matter. Even if he hadn’t heard it before, he had the natural musical ability to follow a melody closely and almost automatically. Clare decided to give him a real test and dug up his recording of Art Tatum doing Tea For Two, with the ground-breaking chord changes Tatum introduced into the tune. The workman never lost a beat nor did he lay out for a bar or two to figure out what was going on. He tracked Tatum flawlessly through all his changes, and when the record ended, he spoke for the first time. He glanced at Clare and with classic English understatement said, ‘Tricky f**ker, ain’t he?’

When you listen to someone improvise, the notes that are played are only half the story.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.