The bad and the beautiful

Blue Note's 60 years

by Jon Garelick

The history of Blue Note Records is nothing less than the history of jazz. You can qualify that statement any way you like -- citing the absence of '60s "new thing" free skronk, of '80s neo-classic avant-garde (Air, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the World Saxophone Quartet, Steve Lacy), even of modernist founding fathers Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie -- and still be left with a catalogue that defines the music, in all its protean forms and myriad evolutions, from the boogie-woogie piano blues of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis and the New Orleans-style recordings by jazz's first great saxophonist, Sidney Bechet, through any number of pathbreaking jazz giants -- Miles, Monk, Ornette, Blakey, Dolphy, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill. A catalogue that now embraces contemporary pacesetters like Cassandra Wilson, Joe Lovano, and Jacky Terrasson (to name a few). The list goes on. It's all included on the new limited-edition 14-CD set The Blue Note Years.

It's not just historical scope that gives Blue Note its edge. Blue Note as much as any label has contributed to jazz's mystique. Beginning in 1956, designer Reid Miles gave Blue Note album jackets a sleek, Bauhaus face that still exerts its influence, both in music and in other areas of graphic design. Engineer Rudy Van Gelder gave the music a hot immediacy that set a new standard for jazz recording. (Van Gelder also hired out to other labels, but it's with Blue Note that he cut his teeth, and for whom he recorded prodigiously through the label's mid-'60s heyday.) Label co-founder Francis Wolff produced a series of photos for the album jackets -- black-and-white images, theatrical for all their documentary detail and realism, the musicians set against black backgrounds, bathed in light of an indefinite source, bent over keyboards and horns and manuscript paper, pencils or cigarettes in hand, smoke trailing into the darkness. These were not posed, grinning entertainers but serious men at work, often grimacing to the task. It's no wonder Joe Jackson couldn't resist copping the cover of a Sonny Rollins's LP for his own Body and Soul. This was jazz cool. (An LP-sized booklet of Wolff's photographs, beautifully printed, and updated with current photos in the same style by Jimmy Katz, is included in the new set.)

The musical reason Blue Note has such a firm grip on a big chunk of jazz history -- aside from seminal recordings by the likes of sui generis wizards like Monk -- is the hard bop and "soul jazz" the label recorded from the mid '50s roughly through 1967. This is the stuff that put Blue Note jazz on the pop charts, most notably with Lee Morgan's 1963 "The Sidewinder." But it began in 1955, with Horace Silver's "The Preacher," a funky, gospel-tinged blues, far simpler not only than standard bebop but than anything the Jazz Messengers of Silver and Art Blakey had recorded. The word is that Wolff's partner, Alfred Lion, thought the tune was too corny to record (this, after all, was the man who was so struck by Thelonious Monk that he immediately wanted to record everything in the revolutionary composer/pianist's book). But the Messengers recorded "The Preacher," scored a hit, and single-handedly saved the then-foundering label. For the next decade and half, the "Blue Note sound" was defined by this bold, blues-based music.

Hard bop and its offshoots (including the Hammond B-3 organ jazz that Jimmy Smith popularized) form the core of The Blue Note Years. Unlike "complete" single-artist boxes, the set doesn't bog down in alternate takes. It's a greatest-hits package organized in a loose chronology that nonetheless maintains unity in its seven double-disc sets. We get Boogie Blues & Bop (1939-1955), The Jazz Message (1955-1960), Organ and Soul (1956-1967), Hard Bop and Beyond (1963-1967), The Avant Garde (1963-1967), The New Era (1975-1998), and Blue Note Then As Now (a collection of "covers" spanning Blue Note's history by artists currently on the label's roster). The good news for consumers without deep pockets is that, beginning in March, the label will be selling the two-disc sets individually, so you can buy The Blue Note Years on the installment plan -- which also allows you to skip volumes that don't appeal.

Not that there's much worth skipping here. Lion and Wolff were German expatriates who had fallen in love with jazz as teenagers in Berlin, between the wars. Wolff arrived first in America, and he established the label in 1939, recording Ammons, Bechet, and Earl Hines in short order. During the '40s (captured on the first disc of Boogie Blues & Bop) he recorded the best in early jazz and swing, including a wonderful clarinet exchange between Bechet and Albert Nicholas and some small-group swing led by tenor-saxophonist Ike Quebec (the label's first unofficial A&R man). By 1947, at Quebec's urging, the label was launched onto bebop.

Bebop up to this time had been characterized by simple arrangements of baroquely complex themes, all chockful of notes, played with blinding speed, followed by solos and then a unison out-chorus. But by the late '40s, bop had begun to slow down. Tadd Dameron's "Our Delight" is noteworthy not just for its manageable medium up-tempo but for the long, gleaming arc of the songlike theme. The same goes for Dameron's "Our Delight." Yet there's room in the arrangements for plenty of virtuosity from the great trumpeter Fats Navarro -- not in Dizzy-like high-note fireworks and 32nd-note runs, but in a tuneful logic that carries through in Navarro's easy, varied phrasing.

From these early foreshadowings of hard bop, that kind of logic carries on throughout the Blue Note '40s dates -- composing and arranging are as important here as virtuoso displays. By the time we get to Silver's "The Preacher," a pop imperative has taken hold: great songs. It's not just the verse-chorus-verse structures that suggest pop. Early bebop's jumping angular melodies and breakneck speeds are replaced by longer phrasing and note values that suggest lyrics. You can imagine singing "The Preacher" in a way that you can't imagine singing Dizzy's "Bebop."

Of course, by the time you get to Blue Note's shaky fusion period (launched by Donald Byrd's breakaway 1973 hit album Black Byrd), you have to ask yourself whether jazz has segued completely into instrumental pop, but there's no doubt about the jazz validity -- and greatness -- of the 1955-'67 period. The emphasis was on blues, minor keys or Eastern-tinged modes, medium tempos, rolling gospel piano vamps, occasional Latin and Caribbean flavors (the latter most notably on Silver's "Song for My Father"). By the time hard bop wore itself out (squeezed on the one side by the jazz avant-garde and on the other by Motown and rock and roll), these procedures had become mannered, cliché'd. Every jazz album had begun to sound the same. And it's not as though Blue Note were completely without fault (I recall a Grant Green version of the theme from Exodus that was particularly unfortunate).

But the beauty of The Blue Note Years is that the chaff has been winnowed. The great anthems of hard bop are here -- "The Preacher," "Song for My Father," Bobby Timmons's "Moanin'," Lee Morgan's "I Remember Clifford" and "The Sidewinder," Herbie Hancock's "Cantaloupe Island." Great improvising bursts out of compositions that have the accessibility of pop tunes. The minor-mode formula is varied with imaginative arrangements that emphasize dynamics and ensemble interaction. This compositional sense carries through the Avant Garde set as well, where Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Jackie McLean, Grachun Moncur III, and Eric Dolphy lend a chamber-jazz like intimacy and narrative order to their most urgent outpourings.

That urgency characterizes the vintage Blue Note material even at its most tuneful and "mainstream." In his at times beautiful little book Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965 (Oxford, 1992), the late David Rosenthal has a chapter called "The Power of Badness," and it singles out Lee Morgan, specifically his solo on Joe Henderson's "Caribbean Fire Dance" (not included on the box set), for its "malice." For some, that malice, and sense of menace, is what would contribute to the music's "badness" and therefore its blackness. It's part of what connects this music to its time, when the civil-rights movement was flowering and the war in Vietnam was well under way. On the box's Avant Garde set, the connections become explicit. During this period, Jackie McLean released an album called Let Freedom Ring, and he wasn't talking merely about keys and time signatures. You can also hear that urgency on the box set in the opening salvo of Art Blakey's drums on the 1955 "Minor's Holiday," and in Silver's 1956 "Señor Blues," where the bridge section seems to pounce with coiled tension, urged on by Byrd's trumpet and the insistent, percussive comping of Silver's piano.

I mention this because some air goes out of the set in the final two-disc volume, Blue Note Then As Now. Not that there aren't good performances on these "covers" -- John Scofield brings his own special kind of sarcasm to Wayne Shorter's "Tom Thumb," vibist Steve Nelson revives some of the dark intensity of vintage Bobby Hutcherson on Jackie McLean's "Omega" (with his tumbling-down lines and repeated figures), and Joe Lovano and Wallace Roney find introspective freedom on Ornette Coleman's "The Good Old Days" (originally from a 1966 Ornette album called The Empty Foxhole). Yet if Blue Note's hard-bop gift is great songs, Then As Now sometimes feels like nothing but songs. The pianist Eliane Elias gives a credible version of Kenny Dorham's "Una Mas," but she's smoothed off the edges (perhaps they're gone with the kick of Tony Williams's cowbell and rims on the original). Kevin Hays's Milesian electro-funk updating of Joe Henderson's "Inner Urge" creates a nice groove, but wasn't there something else in the original? Where's the urge? And Kurt Elling's take on McCoy Tyner's "Tanganyika Dance" sounds downright phony.

But these are quibbles. When you hear the Powell-like gee-whiz virtuosity of Benny Green's "Bish Bash," or Greg Osby's streetwise "Miss D'Meena," or Joe Lovano's exploratory "Lines and Spaces" and Javon Jackson's tuneful-indeed "Not Yet," it restores confidence in Blue Note's ongoing tradition. Going back to the dark days of 1975, I even found myself enjoying the saxophone pop of Ronnie Laws's "Always There." Jazz can respond to the times with a Ronnie Laws single, or an Us3 (built on Blue Note samples), or by licensing bits of its past to the Beastie Boys. But -- as Blakey, Morgan, Henderson, et al., proved -- there's nothing like the fire of direct engagement with the present.