KSUU’s Sunday Jazz

Musician, author and jazz historian Bob Gordon was born in the Seattle area, but has spent most of his life in Southern California. Bob’s love for jazz began early on. While his contemporaries were rocking and rolling, Bob listened to the jazz music which boomed for a time on the west coast. In time, Gordon came to study and love all forms of the genre.

Bob went on to study at college, earning a Masters degree in English at the University of California-Riverside. His understanding and affection for much of the jazz he experienced in Southern California–by the 60s collectively maligned and labeled by the industry “West Coast jazz”, and his scholarly pursuits converged when he authored the book, Jazz West Coast: the Los Angeles Jazz Scene of the 1950s (Quartet, 1986).

In his preface Bob observes, “Naturally enough, the surfeit of attention and critical praise lavished on this music drew an eventual reaction. Jazz writers began to point out (quite correctly) that many of the experiments had little to do with jazz, and that much of the music from the Coast lacked the fire and intensity associated with the best jazz performances…”

As the decade wore on, the term West Coast jazz came increasingly to be used as a pejorative, and musicians and record companies alike hastened to disassociate themselves from the label. By the early sixties, the general consensus seemed to hold that any jazz recorded in Los Angeles in the fifties was suspect. Unfortunately, this latter attitude has prevailed for so long it has somehow taken on the weight of dogma…

This book is an attempt to restore some balance to the commonly-held picture of the Los Angeles jazz scene… There were indeed many failures among the recordings of the West Coast school, many pretentious attempts at grafting the techniques of nineteenth- and twentieth-century concert music to jazz scores. but there were also successes, and a great many recordings of the period deserve better than to be vilified or forgotten simply because they were once branded with the label West Coast jazz.

Bob and Lynn Gordon have made their home in Cedar City since 2004. Bob is active in the Southern Utah music scene. He is a trombonist in the Orchestra of Southern Utah and occasionally  heads a jazz ensemble.