Ballads finds Dexter Gordon at the apex of his career, doing what he does best: playing ballads. The collection is filled with choice cuts that find Gordon and company locking into sleepy pockets where each phrase is given room to dally in the space between beats. Gordon's tone is sultry and warm, as if his tenor sax had polished off a few glasses of scotch before each take. When he takes the lead, there's nothing provocative or flamboyant happening — he knows that the key to ballads isn't the number of notes in any given measure, but the . . .
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