Formed by the same jazz lineage, Gordon and Wardell also shared a heroin habit. The warm, sustaining culture of the Los Angeles prewar jazz scene had, by the 1950s, become a recurring nightmare of crime and punishment. It was a lost decade for Gordon and many jazz musicians, who were often targeted by the authorities: he was busted for drugs in 1952, paroled in 1954, rearrested in 1956, and paroled again in 1960. Like jazzmen Lee Morgan, Elvin Jones, and Tadd Dameron, Gordon had to undergo the dire detox treatment at the US Narcotic Farm (detailed by William Burroughs in his 1953 novel Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict ). LAPD could jail and hold musicians for nothing more than needle marks on their arms or “signs of the presence of drugs” via a dubious test. As saxophonist Hadley Caliman estimated,
[s]eventy-five percent of the musicians in L.A. were trapped there because of drugs. […] They were on parole and because of the law that allowed them to be busted for tracks and internal possession, they could never get out. It was a crime. Their careers were ruined. Their lives were stopped. For nothing.
Gordon spent his incarceration in Chino prison in San Bernardino, California, reading all day and trying to clean himself up. “[W]hen you see the same shit happening over and over again to your life, you finally say, Wow, man, this gotta stop. Bird and Fats and the other guys, it was continuously downhill. But jail saved my life.”
Los Angeles, the place first of Gordon’s discovery and then of his disintegration as an artist, became the site for his rebirth. On parole from Chino prison and back in Los Angeles, he recorded the aptly titled album The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon (1960).
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