One Flight Up is one of the great Blue Note sessions, and I think its official editions have largely failed it. The field here divides sharply: one transfer lets the recording breathe as it was captured, the others interfere with it in ways that cost more than they fix.
Recorded over just one session in Paris in June 1964, One Flight Up is the last album Dexter Gordon made for Blue Note, and one of the most spacious things in his catalogue.
Three tracks, two of them running well past the quarter-hour mark, built on modal vamps that open up rather than resolve.
Gordon had been living in Europe for two years by then, and the rhythm section around him reflects that geography: Kenny Drew and Art Taylor were both based on the continent, and an eighteen-year-old Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, already the house bassist at Jazzhus Montmartre in Copenhagen, brought to Paris specifically for this date.
And the music they've created that one day, well, you can hear the ease of a group that has found its footing. Gordon plays with the unhurried authority that defines his best work, and the room at CBS Studios Paris is as much a presence as anyone on the bandstand.