Blue Note Records
The American label Blue Note
Blue Note jazz is hot and cold, introverted and extroverted, soft and rough, erotic and arty, infinitely multifaceted with all its different styles and always modern - the true contemporary music, or, as Dizzy Gillespie says, the music of this century. By which the jazz protagonist characterized the period from around 1900, when this musical genre was born deep in the south of the USA, until his death in January 1993 and beyond to the present day.
The photographer Francis Wolff and Alfred Lion, both Berliners who had been driven to New York by the turmoil of the time, founded Blue Note Records together with their patron Max Margulis, whose avant-garde photographs are world-famous today. The label that became an artistic platform for the infinitely brilliant jazz musicians of those years. From the record company's first hit, "Summertime" by George Gershwin in Sidney Bechet's recording, to the productions for the army during the war, to the talent scout Ike Quebec, who gave the label a creative boost by promoting the bebop of the small combos as the successor to swing, the years were successful.
Miles Davis entered the stage, the incomparable Thelenius Monk produced "The Genius Of Modern Music", "A New Sound - A New Star" was recorded by Jimmy Smith on his Hammond B3 organ with Rudy Van Gelder, the same Van Gelder who has worked for the Blue Note label from the early 1950s to the present day and was named the best sound engineer in jazz history by "Allmusic" for his brilliant sound.
The Art Blakey Quintet, Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver and Lou Donaldson all worked at Blue Note. The album covers were as stylish as they were ingenious. Painters, graphic artists and photographers such as founding father Francis Wolff, Paul Bacon, the young, then still unknown Andy Warhol and Reid Miles designed covers that are still legendary today.
The style of jazz changed over the years and always reflected the prevailing zeitgeist. Its directions, from New Orleans, swing, bibop, Latin, cool, free and fusion jazz to the acid or smooth jazz of today, are too ingenious to fall into the trivial.
And they are always closely associated with the Blue Note label. The changing ownership that followed the retirement of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff and the break in production from 1979 to 1985 did nothing to diminish the creativity of the Blue Note label.
Today, Blue Note is "The Finest In Jazz Since 1939" and the home of Joe Lovano, Paricia Barber, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Aaron Parks or Anita Baker and The Bird And The Bee. Blue Note jazz: identity and transcendence of music.
