Only one jazz musician has ever been nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award, and he was not a trained actor but a six-foot-six tenor saxophonist whose real life outdid any script. Dexter Gordon was born in Los Angeles in 1923 to Dr. Frank Gordon, one of the city's first African-American physicians, whose patients included Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton, and his maternal grandfather was Medal of Honor recipient Captain Edward L. Baker Jr. He started on clarinet at 13, moved to alto at 15 and tenor at 17, served in the Army Signal Corps in North Africa, and played in the big bands of Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, and Louis Armstrong before heading to New York in late 1944 and diving into the bebop revolution alongside Dizzy Gillespie.

This episode traces his marathon tenor battles with Wardell Gray that Jack Kerouac wrote about in On th ...