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Jazz label captured historical transitions

by Jonathan B. Frey

In 1992, the New Yorker ran a cartoon of two children storming into their parents’ bedroom announcing, “Dad! Dad! Wake up! They just discovered another Marsalis!” As it happens, the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz lists five Marsalises associated with jazz (father Ellis; sons Branford, Wynton, Delfeayo, Jason). More significant to this review, however, is that none of them have ever recorded for Blue Note Records (well, ‘til March 2004 when Wynton released his first with the label). Despite the enormous contribution Blue Note has made to jazz, few of jazz’s most popularly recognized—today’s household names of jazz, if such exists—are associated with the imprint. Louis Armstrong never recorded for Blue Note. Nor did Dizzy Gillespie or Chet Baker. Not Coltrane, Brubeck, Metheny, or Jarrett. Miles did, but only briefly in the early ‘50s; his best-known recording (Kind of Blue) was on another label. Ditto Chick Corea and Charlie Parker. And while Herbie Hancock has an extended catalog with Blue Note, his most widely known albums—Head Hunters and Future Shock—were documented elsewhere.

How then can a blurb for Richard Cook’s new trade edition of Blue Note Records: The Biography (Justin, Charles, and Co., $15) justly claim the book chronicles “the single most recognizable label in history” and “the most famous and influential jazz label of them all”? The answer lies not only in the breadth of Blue Note’s catalog and its near single-handed establishment of hard bop, a funky, accessible style and perhaps the most persistent jazz style today. Equally important has been Blue Note’s intimacy, a characteristic possibly existing at other record companies, but which Blue Note became the preeminent purveyor of and which subsequently became a globally recognized attribute of jazz as a musical genre.

Blue Note was founded in the late ‘30s, a time when jazz musicians and their audience began to challenge the rigid formulas of swing: “in a music supposedly built on a certain freedom of expression, the hallmark of swing-era jazz was its formality.... There was, by 1939, already a hankering after a more purist style of jazz performance....” Enter Alfred Lion, a Berlin-born immigrant working at a New York City import/export firm and a confirmed jazz enthusiast. Despite having no previous recording experience, in January 1939, Lion rented a studio for a day and taped his first sessions, with boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis. Lion’s inexperience in conducting such a session resulted in the music and musicians taking their own course, establishing a relaxed atmosphere and extended soloing as hallmarks of the label’s sessions. By the end of the year, photographer Francis Wolff, a Berlin friend of Lion’s, would join Blue Note, capturing on acetate the musicians in that atmosphere, a visual testament of the artists which appeared worldwide on album covers. Another key element in the Blue Note legacy would occur a decade later, when an optometrist and exacting sound engineer, Rudy van Gelder, would begin recording Blue Note sessions in a studio he’d established in his parents’ living room. Small groups, unrestrained takes, van Gelder’s “democratic” sound, photographs of artists in transformed living spaces—together these would come to exemplify the Blue Note brand. Moreover, the decline of the big band and its associated spectacle, and the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll’s loud, stadium appeal, would conspire to make intimacy a widely held perception of the jazz form overall, serendipitously playing to Blue Note’s strength.

In addition to narrating these developments, Cook’s Blue Note Records—more significantly for jazz devotees—recounts journeymanlike the label’s contributions to bebop (especially those of pianist Thelonious Monk) and its ‘50s hard bop sides of Silver, Blakey, Hubbard, Rollins, and many, many others. Cook closes this new edition with a sober postscript: Blue Note’s 2002 coup—the quadruple platinum, quintuple Grammy-winning, Norah Jones’ release Come Away With Me, which while decidedly healthy for Blue Note’s bottom line—draws little from the tradition reported here, suggesting a new path for a company, which like many others in the industry, is otherwise beset by declining sales and increasing piracy.

July 22, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 30 © 2004 Metro Pulse