This is FRESH AIR. The late saxophonist Dexter Gordon is the subject of a new biography written by his wife Maxine Gordon. Dexter Gordon was a bebop prodigy in the 1940s, was sidelined by drugs in the ...

Maxine Gordon made a single promise to her late husband. “I knew I didn’t want to write a linear jazz biography. That was very important to me, to make a nonlinear narrative, because jazz is not a ...

It was my editor here at The Austin Chronicle who once opened a feature about an Austin musician with the foreboding line, “Jazz will kill you.” Unfortunately, that declarative turned out to be ...