Dexter Gordon: 'Stable Mable,' 1975

Recorded by the tenor saxophonist for Denmark's SteepleChase label, it's back now on vinyl

I still remember buying Dexter Gordon’s LP Stable Mable in 1975 at J&R Music World on Manhattan’s Park Row, across from City Hall. By then I owned most of his Blue Note releases and was curious about his work abroad. Produced by Nils Winther for his SteepleChase label in Denmark, the album featured Dexter Gordon (ts,ss), Horace Parlan (p), Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (b) and Tony Inzalaco (d).

As I recall, I bought the record because Parlan was the pianist. I loved his playing on Gordon’s Doin’ Allright for Blue Note in 1961. It turns out that Stable Mable is the only other small-group recording that united Gordon and Parlan.

I’m not sure when I mistakenly sold off this album along with many others. I do know that when I wanted to listen to it years later, it no longer was in my collection and was out of print.

Now Winther, Steeplechase’s owner, has re-issued the long-lost Gordon record. It’s funny, when you haven’t heard a treasured jazz album in decades and hear it again, you feel as if you’re reconnecting with an old friend.

Gordon is intense and deliberate on the album, methodically pushing himself as if engaged in one of his legendary saxophone duels with another player. And in many ways he was—himself. In 1975, he had reached a career pinnacle, living and working in Europe.

That year, he recorded the live albums Swiss Nights Vols 1, 2 and 3 and Live at Montmartre 1975 as well as the studio releases More Than You Know, Stable Mable, Something Different and Bouncin’ with Dex. In 1975, he also made his first trip to Japan, a tour that resulted in the live album Tokyo 1975.

Most interesting, we also get to hear Gordon on soprano saxophone, playing In a Sentimental Mood. There seems to be equal parts anguish and ecstasy in his playing. I also wondered for the first time whether the Duke Ellington ballad, first recorded by the band in 1935, was Thelonious Monk’s influence for ‘Round Midnight (1944).

The only other ballad on the album is Erroll Garner’s Misty. The other four—the 1931 standard Just Friends, Charlie Parker’s Red Cross, Miles Davis’s So What and Benny Golson’s Stablemates—are barnburners. So What’s tempo is especially fast, perhaps a tick too speedy, which Gorden offsets with fewer solo notes and flecks of John Coltrane’s sheets of sound.

But my favorite track is and always has been Stablemates, set at the same pace as The Chase, Gordon’s earliest daring solo, in 1947, with tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray. The recording established them as dare-devil beboppers with limitless stamina and boundless creativity.

Good to have this old friend back in the collection.

You can buy on CD here. Vinyl is available here.

To read my 2022 interview with Nils Winther, go here.

Here’s Stablemates…

Bonus: Here are Dexter Gordon and trumpeter Red Rodney playing Charlie Parker’s Buzzy, with Kenny Drew (p), Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (b) and Sven Erik Nørregaard (d), on Danish TV’s Dexter’s Jazzparty, in Copenhagen on April 1, 1975…