Dexter Gordon - One Flight Up (Blue Note Tone Poet Series 180g Vinyl LP)

Dexter Gordon - One Flight Up | Vinyl LP - 2021 Blue Note Tone Poet Series Reissue (BST 84176, all-analog mastering by Kevin Gray, 180g pressing at RTI, gatefold sleeve) 

• Recorded in Paris with American expatriates and a teenage Danish bassist, a quintet session featuring Donald Byrd on trumpet, Kenny Drew on piano, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass and Art Taylor on drums
• "Tanya" fills the entire first side, an eighteen-minute modal exploration that predates Bob Dylan's "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" by two years as a single composition occupying one side of a vinyl LP
• Blue Note Tone Poet Series reissue, supervised by Joe Harley, mastered all-analog by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI with a Stoughton Printing gatefold jacket

Dexter Gordon left the United States in 1962 for a residency at the Montmartre club in Copenhagen. Kenny Drew had moved to Paris in 1960. Art Taylor had settled in Europe around the same time. By June 1964, when Francis Wolff flew to Paris to produce this session at CBS Studios, Gordon had assembled a working group from the American expatriate community and supplemented it with the young Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, who was eighteen at the time of recording and already playing with a fluency that most bassists twice his age could not match. "Tanya", Byrd's composition, fills Side A. It opens on a minor modal vamp that shifts between tension and release, the rhythm section alternating between atmospheric suspension and hard-swinging bebop. Gordon builds his solo patiently across the eighteen minutes, his tone warm and unhurried, and when Byrd enters he plays with a brightness and energy that lifts the piece into a different register. Drew's piano sits between the two horns with comping that alternates between McCoy Tyner's impressionism and more conventional hard bop voicings. The engineering by Jacques Lubin is a different sound from Van Gelder's New Jersey studio, more spacious and airy, with Taylor's drums captured with a liveliness that several collectors have singled out as one of the best drum sounds on any Blue Note record.

Side B carries two tracks. "Coppin' the Haven", Drew's composition, follows a similar structure to "Tanya" but at a faster tempo and with more urgency, the quintet locking into a groove that drives all five musicians harder. NHOP's bass work is prominent throughout both quintet pieces, his four-finger plucking technique already producing the rapid, flowing lines that would define his playing for the next four decades. "Darn That Dream", the Van Heusen and DeLange standard, closes the album as a quartet ballad without Byrd, Gordon playing with the kind of lush, generous phrasing that his ballad readings on Go! and A Swingin' Affair had already established. Produced by Francis Wolff, who also took the photographs. This Tone Poet edition was supervised by Joe Harley, mastered all-analog by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, with lacquers cut by Gray and Harley, and pressed on 180g vinyl at Record Technology Incorporated. Gatefold jacket by Stoughton Printing, with Reid Miles cover design and liner notes by Leonard Feather.