Duke Jordan: Flight To Jordan (1960) Blue Note/Toshiba-EMI

Selection 1: Flight To Jordan (Jordan)

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Selection 2: Si-Joya (Jordan)

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Track List

A1 Flight To Jordan 5.32
A2 Star bright 7.49
A3 Squawkin’ 5.00
B1 Deacon Joe 8.43
B2 Split Quick   5.11
B3 Si-Joya 6.46

Artists

Dizzy Reece, trumpet; Stanley Turrentine, tenor saxophone; Duke Jordan, piano; Reggie Workman, bass; Art Taylor, drums; recorded at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, August 4, 1960, released May 1961.

Quick-bio: Duke Jordan.

A career stretching back to the 1940s, a great early bebop pianist, member of Charlie Parker’s original quintet with Miles Davis, and Stan Getz in the early ’50s, recording for Prestige, Mercury, Norgran, Clef and Roost. Duke Jordan first made an impact with Blue Note as sideman (Tina Brooks True Blue) and then as leader with Blue Note on 4046 Flight To Jordan. But nothing followed through.

Jordan’s career faltered, a ten year gap, finding him driving a New York Taxi, only to pick up again in the early 70s, finally resulting in a taxi to the airport and a Flight to Denmark, where he took up long term residence, becoming a regular feature of Steeplechase  recordings in Copenhagen.  Jordan left the stage finally in 2006, age 84. 

Music

Returning to some Blue Note titles I neglected first time around, and not played in several years, I pulled Duke Jordan’s debut for Blue Note, 84046 Flight To Jordan. 

Flight to Jordan features British/West Indian trumpet player Dizzy Reece. Whilst a few British jazz men tried to storm the American market, Reece had more success than most, more an American stylist than fellow West Indies trumpet player Harry Beckett, who was more  at home in the British jazz Separate Development movement. Reece is the star of this album. His steadfast delivery, precise intonation and sustain stands proud in front of Jordan’s compositions. With trumpet it’s all in the tone and the voice. The ballads are liquid and beautifully delivered.

Jordan was a strong composer (Jordu; Les Liason’s Dangereuse; No Problem) credited with all the tracks on the Flight.  A fine, Bud Powell-influenced melodic/rhythmic player, with some of the bouncy propulsion of Sonny Clark. A steady comping left hand, his right hand dances over the keys, lyrical motifs and seamless fills, gifting his front line the spotlight on almost every tune, as well as delivering sparkling form himself.   

Stanley Turrentine’s tenor is  bluesy and fiery, with a little Texas honking. Mobley would have been nice, but you can’t have everything, as deadpan comedian Steven Wright asked: ” You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”  The drums and bass provide a firm sound foundation. 

Jordan’s compositions are early 60s bop fare, in the musical territory of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, an opening theme which soon lifts off in to more interesting interplay, which is what this music is really all about, and this is a great session. 

There is such a lot of fabulous music on Blue Note from this period, Duke Jordan’s contribution can easily be overlooked, but the music has withstood the passing of time, and this title is a welcome showcase to  preserve the talents of Dizzy Reece. All Music awarded the album an exceptional 5 stars, well deserved.

Vinyl: BNST 84046 Toshiba-EMI reissue Japan (1992)

Rudy recorded and mixed this session hot, and Toshiba engineers kept up the heat – Side 2 packs 20 minutes of music into the grooves, cut loud, leaving scarcely two turns of lead out to the lock groove. Despite the fetish of modern audiophile reissues packing quieter narrow grooves towards the outer edges of the vinyl, allegedly to avoid distortion, the gain here is high, and I have to say, hot sounds better.

I assumed wrongly this reissue was 70’s or early 80’s, surprised it is as late as 1992, six or seven years into the digital era. I generally counsel against Toshiba Blue Notes beyond the late 80s due to digital encroachment, but this issue sounds outstanding, which doesn’t often happen with Japanese pressings. Good job I didn’t take my own advice. Disclaimer: I haven’t heard an original for comparison, which may be sounds even better, but I still rate this edition highly compared with many dozens of Japanese pressings.

Current thinking is that the Blue Note copy tapes used for early Toshiba remasters remained in Japan, used for successive reissues by King and again later by Toshiba. It is as good an explanation as any as regards sources. Van Gelder digital remasters for CD (RVG Editions) were not created until the end of the 90s. I am pretty sure this 1992 edition is not from a PCM digital copy, or at least it doesn’t sound like one. It sounds fresh true analogue.

The stereo channel separation is strong, tonal and dynamic range likewise, little if any untoward compression, a very good natural-sounding vinyl edition, and cheap as chips compared with originals. I have not heard Analog Productions efforts, but this Toshiba is hard to beat. Possibly the early LNJ-series Toshiba is even better, who knows.

Maybe I missed it but I didn’t find an NY label reissue, or the usual succession of Liberty and United Artists reissues, aside from in the classic replica Div-UA series, which Cohen describes as “UA stereo, mistakenly issued with mono labels” ( ? Cohen p64). It seems Van Gelder never cut a stereo master of Flight to Jordan, a curious omission which likely accounts for the scarcity and premium placed on the original W63rd mono edition.  Instead, our friends in Japan have a long history of reissues of 84046, from 1st wave Toshiba (LNJ series), King, and again frequently from Toshiba. Just count the Obi’s below.  A Japanese pressing in this case is no poor relation, it’s  a  sensible  choice.

Collector’s Corner

Al Perlman at Jazzcollector in 2012 said: “Here are a few I’ve been watching on eBay that could fill holes in my collection, but the prices . . .Duke Jordan, Flight to Jordan, Blue Note 4046. This was an original pressing in VG++ condition for the record and M- for the cover. It sold for $755. I do own this record, a Japanese pressing…”

The usual suspects weighed in, gave Pearson’s Flight the thumbs down, a “rasberry”

1960’s, Juke Box Jury

“Compositions lame “.. “mediocre”… Alun, Rudolf, Shaft, Fredrik, Michel, Katharsis, Ceedee…put the boot in. Hi guys, 2012, those were the days! I think I must have shared those views at the time, I voted Jordan’s Flight  a “MISS”. The collector market, being a different sort of animal, put its value somewhat higher than Al’s expectation, which now looks a bit of a bargain.

Popsike: Blue Note  4046 Flight to Jordan Top Fifteen auctions $1,000 -$2,000

The auction price, as our friends pointed out, reflects the desirability of the artefact, only sometimes the quality of the sound or the music. Interestingly, most of the top auction values originate from the pandemic-years, collectors imprisoned in front of a screen. Hi diddle-e-dee, a Collector’s Life For Me. Ironically, Jordan’s most valuable record at $2,215 is in fact a French 10″ Vogue/Swing album from 1954. As disgraced DJ Jimmy Saville might have said, Howsaboutthatthen?

Ten years have since flown by.  I revisited the Flight To Jordan album only recently. After many significant h-ifi upgrades, I discovered the pure beautiful tone and force of Dizzy Reece’s trumpet in way I had never previously experienced. 

I put this down  to the Dynavector XV1T cartridge upgrade, which has opened up sound quality, in a sometimes shocking transformation. Can a new cartridge make you feel differently about a piece of music?  It’s more than the CD vs Vinyl debate, more than this vinyl edition against that vinyl edition, or I do or don’t like the music. How much of the music are you actually able to hear? You can’t separate the quality of the music from the quality of the reproduction. It’s the experience of what you hear.

Imagine the absence of sensitivity in information retrieval: a rusty nail stylus trying to read the vinyl undulations that contain the  musical information. Now enhance the reading sensitivity to the other extreme, all that information is now coursing down the cantilever to hyper-sensitive coils, translated through amplification into moving air. That beautiful sound was always there, locked in the groove walls, but I couldn’t hear it, because the stylus and cartridge used at the time (Dynavector TKR), which was very good by any standard, did not retrieve all the information like the XV1T. 

Hearing it now is a new experience, how it sounds, it is not the same record any more. The fact this is coming out of a thirty year old Japanese pressing is doubly shocking. It should not sound this good.

LJCTip! Therein lies the danger of disposing of records which at a point in time you didn’t think were very good. If you are open-minded, your opinion is open to change.  What you hear changes as you improve your system and your range of listening experience expands. Your judgement evolves. My advice is to put  a questioned record aside, to re-evaluate at a future date. You may have a great record there and not know it.

There is a downside to all this cartridge sensitivity. Some recordings I thought were pretty good now sound quite disappointing, especially those remasters from digital files, hard to listen to at all. However vintage original analogue pressings sound great, and in many cases , thrilling, light up the room with a six-metre soundstage.

I may be on my own on this flight! Flight attendant – any chance of an upgrade?

 

There is more to this audiophile vinyl business than meets the ear.

LJC