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Dexter Gordon – One Flight Up

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

  • One Flight Up returns to the site for only the second time in years, here with solid Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides of this 70s Blue Note reissue pressing – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • With its presence, clarity, space and timbral accuracy, this is guaranteed to be one of the best sounding jazz records you’ve heard in a very long time
  • One of our very favorite Blue Note recordings for both music and sound, a Dexter Gordon classic of soulful hard bop
  • Turn it up good and loud and it’s as if you are right up front at one of the best 60s jazz concerts imaginable
  • According to my notes, we haven’t done a shootout for this title since 2018
  • I hope we can look forward to the next shootout winner showing up before 2032
  • This is a Must Own Jazz Album from 1964 that belongs in every jazz-loving audiophile’s collection

Both the sax and the trumpet sound unbelievably good — airy and breathy with lots of body and clearly audible leading edge transients.

It’s hard to find a Blue Note where the horns aren’t either too smooth or too edgy, but here they have just the right amount of bite. The overall sound is open, spacious, tonally correct from top to bottom and totally free from distortion.

The presence and immediacy on this copy are superb. Just listen to the snare drum at the beginning of Coppin’ The Haven — it sounds like someone is bangin’ on that thing right in your very own living room!

This copy has the power of live music. When we turned it up loud it was as if we were right up front at one of the best jazz concerts imaginable. The music is every bit as good — soulful hard bop played superbly and passionately.

Listen to Donald Byrd blowing his lungs out on his own composition, Tanya, or Gordon’s lyrical solo on Darn That Dream — these guys are pros at the top of their game.

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For Audiophiles Just Getting Started, Beware of LPs that Will Inhibit Your Progress

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

Robert Brook wrote a scathing review of the Tone Poets pressing of One Flight Up in 2023, much to the dissatisfaction of some of his readers. I was the first to leave a comment as I thought he hit the nail on the head when he said:

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?

The snare sounds muted. the piano weak, the horns, especially Gordon’s saxophone, resolves poorly and becomes increasingly tiresome to listen to. On my first listen I lasted about 3 minutes into side 1, mostly because I couldn’t stand the way the sax was sounding.

I posted the comments below on Robert’s review. (I have taken the liberty to rewrite some of my comments for the purposes of clarity, along with some additional thoughts.)

Robert,

Another great post. I have many comments to make, so here goes.

When audiophiles prefer records which are clearly second-rate, more often than not I chalk it up to their lack of a better record to play. In order to hear what they are missing, they have to have a record with sound that somehow makes clear to them precisely which aspects of the sound are failing, or at the very least, not up to par.

You could give out the stamper numbers for your Blue Note reissue — I would be surprised if it does not have VAN GELDER STEREO in the dead wax — and those who like the Tone Poets release of One Flight Up could easily find one on Discogs or Ebay and do the comparison for themselves.

But you know what? I would bet you dollars to donuts they will never do that. They simply can’t be bothered.

To some audiophiles who collect records, collecting is fundamentally not about sound quality.

It’s about collecting the right audiophile pressings.

These folks don’t want some old Blue Note reissue from the 70s. They want a fancily-packaged remastered record on high quality vinyl that’s made by a label that really cares. If it’s a numbered limited edition, even better!

If these people wanted to find out what is wrong with the sound of the Tone Poets pressing you played — thanks for laying it all out in detail so no one can doubt that you listened carefully and heard what’s really in those grooves — they could easily find a vintage copy of the record that would make a mockery of the one they own.

Twenty years ago I wrote something about this very subject:

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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.

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Robert Brook Shoots Out One Flight Up

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

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

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.

UPDATE 2025

We have now played the Tone Poets pressing for ourselves, and if anything, Robert is being too kind!

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.

Robert concludes with his take on the strengths and weaknesses of the two pressings. Here is a 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?

He goes on in much more detail, but this is exactly the kind of sound we hear on one Heavy Vinyl pressing after another. For some reason, none of these shortcomings appears to bother the fans of the label. I get why this guy is missing the boat: he actually thinks a system with five inch woofers can play jazz. What possible excuses could these other people have? [1]

The complete review can be found below. If you are considering following the crowd and buying some of this label’s albums, you might want to take it slow. (Those of you with five inch woofers can charge right ahead. The sonic problems with the Tone Poets releases Robert Brook describes would barely be audible on such a system, so get while the gettin’s good. Just make sure you are never tempted to upgrade to big speakers. You could find yourself in the unfortunate position of needing a new record collection to go along with them. Unlike Tone Poets releases, good records ain’t cheap.)

Dexter Gordon’s ONE FLIGHT UP: One of the Better TONE POETS?

[1] This is rhetorical question. These other folks have no excuses. They have exactly the sound quality they have earned by underutilizing the two most important audio resources they have at their disposal: time and money.

If they have failed to put in enough of either one or both, they have only themselves to blame for letting themselves be fooled by the chalatans currently marketing one meretricious [2] Heavy Vinyl pressing after another.

If they decide to remedy this sad state of affairs, we are more than happy to guide them in the new and exciting direction we’ve pioneered over the course of the last twenty years or so. The advice we give in this commentary would be a good place to start: first get good sound – then you can recognize and acquire good records

For another 60+ pieces of record collecting advice, more than enough to keep anyone busy for months, perhaps years, please click here.

[2] To save you the trouble of looking it up, Merrian-Webster defines meretricious as apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity. Used to suggest pretense, insincerity, and cheap or tawdry ornamentation.

For a deeply meretricious release of recent vintage (OBI strip!, custom booklet!, premium heavy vinyl!, fold-open cover!), see The Cars on Rhino. The only thing left out of the package was a good sounding LP.

Further Reading

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One Flight Up Is a Dubby Mess on Cisco Heavy Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Recordings Available Now

Sonic Grade: D

An audiophile hall of shame pressing from Cisco / Impex / Boxstar.

You will have a hard time finding any pressing that doesn’t sound better than this “dubby” Cisco LP.

The DMM reissues are worse — no Blue Note pressings could possibly be so ridiculously bad as they are — but I can’t think of any others offhand that would be.

The CDs, maybe, who really knows, but that’s a case of apples and oranges.

If smeared transients and zero ambience are your idea of good sound, this is the record for you! 

Dexter Gordon Knocked Us Out All the Way Back in 2007

Hot Stamper Pressings of Blue Note Albums Available Now

[Some text has been altered, mostly the overuse of capitalization removed.]

This Blue Note LP is without a doubt one of the best sounding jazz records we’ve ever heard. We were auditioning a bunch of jazz records today (4/25/07), and when the needle hit the grooves on this one we were absolutely blown away.

I can’t think of one jazz record we’ve ever played here at Better Records with this kind of whomp. Everything here is so rich and full — nothing like a typical Blue Note album.

Both the sax and the trumpet sound unbelievably good — airy and breathy with lots of body and clearly audible leading edge transients. It’s hard to find a Blue Note where the horns aren’t either too smooth or too edgy, but here they have just the right amount of bite. The overall sound is open, spacious, tonally correct from top to bottom and totally free from distortion. We’ve heard good copies of this album before, but this one is magical.

The presence and immediacy on this copy are stunning. Just listen to the snare drum at the beginning of Coppin’ The Haven — it sounds like someone is bangin’ that thing right in your living room.

We’ve never heard a Blue Note with this kind of clarity, this kind of transparency, and this much life. We rate it an A+++ on both sides — Master Tape Sound, As Good As It Gets.

This copy has the power of live music. When we turned it up loud, it was as if we were right up front at one of the best jazz concerts imaginable. The music is every bit as good — soulful hard bop played superbly and passionately.

Just listen to Donald Byrd blowing his lungs out on his own Tanya, or Gordon’s lyrical solo on Darn That Dream — these guys are pros at the top of their game.

Further Reading