BLP 4176

Dexter Gordon - One Flight Up

Released - August 1965

Recording and Session Information

Barclay Studios, Paris, France, June 2, 1964
Donald Byrd, trumpet #1,2; Dexter Gordon, tenor sax; Kenny Drew, piano; Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, bass; Art Taylor, drums

Francis Wolff, producer.

1387 tk.13 Coppin' The Haven
1386 tk.17 Tanya
1388 tk.23 Darn That Dream

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Tanya	Donald Byrd	June 2 1964
Side Two
Coppin' the Haven	Kenny Drew	June 2 1964
Darn That Dream	Eddie DeLange, Jimmy Van Heusen	June 2 1964

Liner Notes

IN July 1964 an informal and mutually stimulating discussion by Dexter Gordon, Kenny Drew and two other expatriate jazzmen was published in Down Beat. The subject was ‘American in Europe.” Perhaps the most significant remark in the entire round-table talk was made by Dexter. Since I’ve been over here,” he said, “I felt that I could breathe, and I just be more or less a human bring, without being white or black... I think the Scandinavian audiences are very discerning. In fact, my biggest experience in communicating with audiences has been here in Copenhagen... The audience here is very ‘inside.’ This is their capacity.”

The intelligent interest shown by their listeners, and the almost total lack of racial prejidice, are not the only factors that have lured so many American musician to the Continent and kept them there in recent years. An equally vital attraction is the opportunity to work steadily in a single job without having to shift around continually from club to club or city to city every other week.

"I have played for months on end at the Montmartre in Copenhagen,” said Dexter recently. That’s been more or less my headquarters ever since I moved over here in 1962. Now I’ve never in my life played three or four months continuously at a place in the U.S. The opportunity to work regularly in the same spot gives you the kind of feeling you need to stretch out, relax, and at the same time develop musically without having those job-to-job worries hanging over your head.”

Kenny Drew had some similar observations to make along these lines, in the Down Beat report. Asked what he had gotten out of living and playing in Europe, he replied, “In a way, I’ve found myself, because I’ve had to be more responsible to myself and for myself... I’m my own man. I’ve been taking care of business myself — something I never did in the States... Musically, I’ve found myself by working so long and so much.... I can think more, act more, be more, I guess... My mind is functioning properly now.’

Obviously, conditions and reactions like these must be reflected in the music. Dexter’s first overseas album, Our Man In Paris (Blue Note 4146 BLP4146, made it apparent that hi residence abroad would stimulate him to a consistently high performance level. and that there would be no danger of his stagnating in the new milieu.

Though Copenhagen has been Dex’s home for the past couple of years, the other European capitals are of course within easy reach and he has made several field trips, including a couple to Paris. It was here that Frank Wolff of Blue Note arranged for him to assemble an all-star group for the present sides.

Kenny Drew left his native land for Paris in June of 1960 to play with The Connection. Though only set for six weeks’ work with the play, he says: ‘I actually knew I wasn’t going back under any circumstances.” He has lived and worked in Paris since then.

Donald Byrd and Art Taylor spent the last half of 1958 touring the Continent with the late Bobby Jaspar. Byrd returned to Paris in 1963 to study with Nadia Boulanger, but came home in the summer of 1964 to teach at Ken Morris’ Summer Jazz Clinics. Taylor, after working around New York with various groups, left for Paris, Rome and other points East in the early fall of 1963.

This leaves one member of the present group unaccounted for: the gentleman with the double-barreled name, Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen.

This is a remarkable example,” says Dexter, “of the kind of talent that’s coming up now on the Continent. He’s only 18 years old, but I believe he’s the very bet bass player in all of Europe. Kenny and I worked with him in Copenhagen, and of course I just bad to bring him to Paris to make this session with us.”

Orsted (he is usually known by this name) was only 17 when Count Basie heard him and promptly offered him a job. Because of problems that arose concerning his tender age, the young Dane never came to the U.S., but the fact that men like Dex and Basie have flipped over him would seem to indicate that if and when he does decide to make the hop, there will be limitless opportunities for him. As these sides show, he has everything required of a bass player nowadays — a great sound, suppleness, ideas and a firm beat.

Given this unusual concentration of talent, it is not surprising that the five musicians were compatible and eloquent enough to stretch out extensively, so that the Donald Byrd composition Tanya runs to 18 minutes and occupies the entire first side.

What is remarkable about this track is not its length, but rather the consistency of performance that is maintained throughout; it is evident that each soloist felt free to blow until he had completed his thoughts, or sustained the mood for what he felt was just the right duration.

There are two simple thematic patterns. The first is based on a hauntingly declamatory E Flat Minor 7 figure.

This figure is retained, with variations, as Kenny Drew uses it for introduction, interludes and backgrounds. off and on throughout the side.

Dexter’s solo, while displaying all his expected warmth and strength, is most notable for its conservative yet imaginative use of spare melodic lines, sometimes even of single notes bent downward in a spellbinding lamest. A less mature artist might have used this time to build up to endless flurries of sixteenth notes; yet at the end of his performance the feeling is the same — rhythmically, melodically and technically — as when he began, which gives the solo an extraordinary consistency. Donald maintains the same spirit in his own work; then Kenny. in a harmonically rich contribution, shows the extent to which he has absorbed the new model feeling that has been invading so much of the modern jazz scene.

Coppin’ The Haven, a Kenny Drew line, is a 32-bar minor theme played in unison by the two horns. Though somewhat shorter and taken at a slightly faster tempo, it has some of the same qualities as Tanya in terms of mood-building. Kenny’s touch and sound, both in the comping and during his admirable solo, indicate that he has indeed developed impressively under conditions nourished by steady work in happy company. The entire rhythm section, in fact, distinguishes itself on this track, and the great clarity and separation enables one to hear exactly what each member is doing to instil a maximum of variety into the performance.

Darn That Dream is a quartet track; in other words, a ballad solo by Dexter. The 25-year-old song, its pretty changes untarnished by time, makes as suitable a vehicle for his slow, rhapsodic style as did You’ve Changed, a highlight of an earlier album (Doín' Allright, Blue Note 4077). Kenny’s half-chorus offers a simply beautiful example of how to keep a solo moving without ever losing the lyrical essence of the tune.

I don’t know whether there was any special significance in the title of this album, other than whatever can be deduced from the cover photo (could it he that that’s Tanya’s pad up there?). Anyhow, it could aptly be interpreted as meaning that the participants have moved one flight up in creativity, that their flights of fancy are freer than ever under Paris skies. Here are four men who have spent a substantial proportion) of their time lately learning the ins and outs of French, Danish and other languages; with them is a teenaged musical prodigy who has spoken Danish all his life. Together, the five offer a splendid demonstration of how to speak the international language of jazz.

- LEONARD FEATHER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT ONE FLIGHT UP

The correspondence between Francis Wolff of Blue Note Records and Dexter Gordon, which was reprinted when the label collected all of its 1960s recordings by the saxophonist in a boxed set, sheds much light on this particular album, and the conditions that led its four American stars to find themselves in Europe. For, as Wolff said in a note penned a month before the session, "It's a tough struggle. Jazz is not exactly booming away here, to put it mildly."

Wolff was referring to the drying up of the nightclub scene and the indifference of the general public that had already sent scores of talented artists packing, and that would only get worse once the Beatles phenomenon took hold and pop music grew sophisticated enough to hold its audience beyond their teenage years. Add the racism that every Black American, musician or not, lived with on a daily basis, and it is not surprising that Gordon and Kenny Drew responded to life in Europe so positively in the article that Leonard Feather cites. Europe was no paradise, to be sure — as Joachim E. Berendt noted in a response to the Down Beat roundtable, it took an established name, local connections such as foreign-born spouses, and the luck to work at either Paris's Blue Note club (where Drew held an extended job) or Copenhagen's Montmartre to really thrive — but for the four expatriates heard here, Europe did offer professional and lifestyle options unimaginable had they remained Stateside.

As Feather noted, the individuals involved had a variety of reasons for coming to the Continent, and stayed for varying lengths of time. Donald Byrd did go home after his studies with Nadia Boulanger, but used the relationships he had established to return to Europe frequently in the ensuing years. One point, which Drew misstated in the roundtable and Feather carried over to his notes, does need correcting. It was June of 1961 when the pianist reached Paris with The Connection, as is attested to by the numerous Blue Note sessions at Rudy Van Gelder's studios that Drew participated in, including his own Undercurrent, between September 1960 and early the following June.

Given that finding talented native sidemen to perform with visiting Americans remained a problem, Wolff must have been overjoyed to find three other artists with Blue Note ties in town when he arrived in Paris to record One Flight Up. The ringer on the session was a young man that Gordon had first raved about in a letter to Wolff a year earlier. "There is a 16-year-old bass player with us who is a gas," Gordon had written of Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen in February 1963, and in another letter the following January he stressed how good NHØP and fellow Dane Alex Riel had sounded in a rhythm section with Drew at the Montmartre. Yet the session did not go smoothly, as Wolff underscored in a letter he wrote upon his return to New York. "The atmosphere in Paris, unfortunately, is not very conducive to recording sessions. This applies especially to the studio situation where we had to reserve a studio two weeks in advance and then were unable to come back in case we wanted to for another two weeks." In addition, it appears that problems which almost ended Gordon's career in the '50s, and about which both he and Wolff talked in their letters, had resurfaced. "It was amazing how rapidly I went back into that old bag — from being depressed and being surrounded by old friends in a similar shaky condition," Gordon wrote three weeks after the date. "I think I have to watch myself!!" In any event, the remaining recordings that Gordon did under his Blue Note contract at the time were made when he returned home for a visit one year later.

The album was originally intended to feature four tracks, including "Kong Neptune," but Alfred Lion and Wolff felt that each attempt at Gordon's original had lost its groove after the initial choruses. Yet the extended length of "Coppin' the Haven" and "Tanya" made it possible to salvage a program that filled an LP, and both that program and the CD version (now extended with the better of the "Kong Neptune" takes) present a better facsimile of a Gordon club set than any of his previous studio efforts. The Drew and Byrd compositions reflect modal influences with their static harmonic stretches, which only underscore Gordon's mastery at building tenor solos with drama. "Tanya" became one of the saxophonist's signature numbers, and his solo here received lyrics three decades later from Kurt Elling, which can be heard as "Tanya Jean" on Elling's own Blue Note album The Messenger.

— Bob Blumenthal, 2003