Extract .tar.gz to specific directory

I want to extract all files form a “.tar.gz” file to a specific directory (not the current).

When you ask Google you quickly come up with the elegant solution:

$ gzip -cd /some/dir/something.tar.gz | tar -xvf - -C /specific/directory

Somehow my development machine doesn’t accept this, as I keep getting the error:

File -C not present in the archive.
File /specific/directory not present in the archive.

I couldn’t find the answer, but as usual many ways lead to Rome. I’m able to extract the files to the current directory using

$ gzip -cd /some/dir/something.tar.gz | tar -xvf -

Therefore I can simply change the current directory to my specific directory and after the extraction return to the prior directory (I need to unzip the file in a script, therefore I need a generic approach). When we put all that together the following finally works:

$ cd /specific/directory && gzip -cd /some/dir/something.tar.gz | tar -xvf - && cd -