Born in Los Angeles in , Gordon took up the clarinet in his early teens and then spent the early and mid-1940s putting in time on the tenor saxophone with some of the most prominent big bands of the day—those of Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, and Billy Eckstine.
This was the golden era of bebop's emergence, and Gordon was for a while the new music's star tenor, mixing with the likes of Charlie Parker and Dizzy and Dizzy ...