You are the act

Some of the bebop players turned their backs on an audience that asked for a tune. Gordon did not.

You’re not sitting in a pit, playing for acts—you’re the act, and you’ve got to try and establish some kind of rapport with the public.

If he got a request, as long as it was within reason and in his repertoire, he was glad to play it. That, he thought, was one of the things that would bring jazz to its rightful height.

On the bandstand

Before a ballad he would recite its lyric at the microphone. The pianist Dave Bass remembered him doing it with As Time Goes By, the horn held level, before he played a note.

The photograph above: Gordon at the bar of the Keystone Korner, San Francisco, 31 October 1981, with Art Pepper and the poet Jack Hirschman. Brian McMillen, CC BY-SA 3.0.