Kevin Gray Returns to the Scene of the Crime for One Flight Up

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

Robert Brook wrote about the Tone Poets remastered pressing of One Flight Up a few year back. We noted at the time:

We have never heard the Tone Poets pressing that Robert played against the Van Gelder cutting he discusses in his commentary.

We have one in stock and are just waiting to do the shootout for the album so that we can compare it to the better pressings we know we will find.

You may have read that we were knocked out by a killer copy way back in 2007. We expect to be no less knocked out in 2023.

Make that 2025. (Clean Blue Note pressings are hard to come by.)

Robert concludes with the strengths and weaknesses of the two pressings. Here is an excerpt:

Overall, the Tone Poet is closed, distant and frankly boring to listen to. Where is the energy of the music? Where is the presence of these musicians? Where is the studio space?

Now that we’ve played the Tone Poets pressing against the best Blue Notes we could find, we know exactly what he means!

Kevin Gray had previously cut the record for Cisco and made a real mess of it, so we are not the least bit surprised that this newer version is every bit as bad sounding as that one.

Why anyone is hiring this hack to make records is a mystery to those of us who play them, and if for some reason it isn’t a mystery to you, it should be.

How inaccurate and unrevealing does a stereo have to be in order to hide the shortcomings of this incompetently mastered record? If you have such a stereo — and there seem to be plenty of them out there in audio land, judging by the fact that Tone Poets is still in business — now is the time to get rid of it, or, at the very least, start making major improvements.

You might want to consider taking some audio advice from us along those lines.

Robert Brook has plenty to say on that subject as well.

Here are the notes we took while playing the Tone Poets pressing after completing our shootout. We had already heard some killer copies, the White Hot shootout winners, so we knew just how good the record could sound.

Side One

  • No real top
  • Very veiled and dry
  • Boomy, loose bottom
  • The dynamics in the snare and horn are gone
  • Not as bad as side two but still NFG

Side Two

  • So thin and small and bright
  • Odd, boomy compressed bass
  • Ride cymbal and sax are so dry and veiled
  • Our grade: NFG

Yup, that sounds like a record Kevin Gray could have cut! Terrible? Of course it is.

We’ve played plenty of them and it’s hard to find one that’s not awful.

Kevin Gray’s transistory, opaque, airless, low-resolution cutting system is almost guaranteed to make even the most wonderful analog recordings sound like CDs, and often worse than a CD. I have lots of great sounding CDs in my collection. If any of them sounded as bad as this Tone Poets LP, I would have traded in the ones that did years ago.

We discuss that subject in some depth here. You can add this disaster to the list of bad sounding Heavy Vinyl we’ve reviewed in 2024/25.

Further Reading

J0e Harley’s Story (emphasis added)

The LPs are mastered directly from the original analog master tapes by Kevin at his incredible facility called Cohearent Mastering. We go about it in the exact same way that we did for so many years for the Music Matters Blue Note reissues. We do not roll off the low end, boost the top or do any limiting of any kind. We allow the full glory of the original Blue Note masters to come though unimpeded! Short of having an actual time machine, this is as close as you can get to going back and being a fly on the wall for an original Blue Note recording session.

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