Blue Note record label is a synonym of excellence in jazz since the late 50’s, when the seat went from Los Angeles to New York. More precisely, after the difficult years from 1951 to 1956, during which the catalogue was mainly in a not popular 10” single format, in the year 1956 the earliest LP was released for Johnny Hammond, and the event gave way to a general renewal of the catalogue itself. The national reputation was gained in the 60’s, while the global notoriety has gradually come after the year 1979, when the label was acquired by EMI. I let the most interested readers personally follow the recent history, from the 80’s to now.
Blue Note was founded in the year 1939, by two
German-Jewish refugees, Alfred Lion and Max Margulis, two lovers of jazz music.
Max Margulis was a communist writer. The project started to raise the interest
of the best jazz musicians around the year 1947, especially thanks to the
examples of Ike Quebec, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, James Moody, Bud Powell,
and Miles Davis. Around the 50’s, Blue Note has acquired the main, recognized
musical traits, and successively has been normally associated to two sub-genres
of jazz, hard bop and avant-garde. However, in my opinion, despite of the many
changes, the essence of Blue Note has always been coherent, or substantially
stable.
The fundamental element of the typical sound
from Blue Note is the bluesy side of jazz. After the Word War II, the label
established the praxis of organizing recording sessions early in the morning, a
congenial time for musicians, who were generally working on evenings and nights
at clubs and bars. A wider involvement of musicians has been appreciated, and
has provoked a deeper influence of their felings and states of mind. How can I
describe a common state of mind of tired and half-drunk jazz musicians, still
at work after a sleepless night? I have chosen a significant linguistic
expression, “morning recoin”. Well, morning recoin has often been the seed of
the typical sound of Blue Note, a bluesy kind of hard bop, the bepop with a
clearly audible presence of soul, rhythm ‘n’ blues, and gospel. As you can
understand, the tunes on Blue Note are often perfectly associable to
depressants, such as alcohol, and to moments of sad and painful
consciousness.
