In 1928, a young German-Jewish man named Alfred Lion arrived in New York to look for work. He was also looking for music—specifically, jazz. He had come to the right place. The year before, Duke Ellington's band began a residency at the Cotton Club in Harlem that would last for almost four years. Other luminaries playing bars and ballrooms the length and breadth of Manhattan during this period included Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson and Coleman Hawkins. Lion saw some of these giants play. And he bought their records in large quantities.
He returned to Germany in the early 1930s, just as the political situation was becoming darker. By 1936, after Hitler had taken power and the Nazis had forbidden the broadcasting of American jazz, Lion was back in New York, where he found a job in an export company and began hanging out at a record store on 52nd Street .
In December 1938, after seeing Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis play at Café Society downtown, Lion decided he wanted to get the two musicians into a studio and record them for the label he'd decided to set up, which he would name Blue Note Records. "It is doubtful," Richard Havers writes in Uncompromising Expression, his magnificent celebration of the label's 75th anniversary, "whether… Lion had any real notion of how to make a profit from his first recording sessions." And it's not clear whether he ever did make any money from the first two records released by the fledgling label in March 1939—"Melancholy" and "Solitude" by Lewis (BN1) and Ammons's "Boogie Woogie Stomp" and "Boogie Woogie Blues" (BN2)—but that wasn't the point. Lion's passion was now preserved in shellac.
Lion's first business partner was Max Margulis, a writer and musician, but he was soon replaced by a childhood friend of Lion's from Berlin, Francis Wolff. Lion and Wolff released records intermittently throughout the 1940s, but, as Havers observes, it wasn't really until the 1950s that Blue Note finally "found its style, its natural rhythm, and truly began to deliver on its original founding principles." In this, its imperial phase, Blue Note was the beneficiary of two developments, one musical, the other technological. Lion and Wolff were early adopters of bop—they released their first recording of Thelonius Monk in 1947 (the second Monk recording for Blue Note was "Round About Midnight", later known as "Round Midnight", which Billboard magazine described as "interesting bop stuff by the granddaddy of the bopsters"). They also embraced the 12-inch LP—introduced by Columbia Records in 1954—with alacrity. And it's by Blue Note's album sleeves in that format, designed throughout the late 1950s and 1960s by Reid Miles, that many know the label. Havers's sumptuously illustrated book contains many examples of Miles's distinctive visual grammar, which combined photographs with bold, modernist typography.
Havers doesn't neglect the way Blue Note records in this period sounded, either. The crystalline sharpness of Blue Note recordings, which compare favourably with the output of other major jazz labels of the Fifties and Sixties (Verve, Prestige and Riverside, for example), was the work of producer Rudy Van Gelder, who began recording sessions in the living room of his parents' house in Hackensack, New Jersey, before moving to a purpose-built studio in nearby Englewood Cliffs. The jazz historian Ira Gitler once described Van Gelder's studio in decidedly ecclesiastical terms: "In the high-domed, wooden-beamed, brick-tiled, spare modernity of Rudy Van Gelder's studio, one can get a feeling akin to religion; a non-sectarian, non-organised religion temple of music in which the sound and the spirit can seemingly soar unimpeded."
For worshippers at the shrine of Blue Note, Havers's book is the closest thing they'll find to holy scripture aside from the records themselves. On Saturday 22nd November, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival, Havers will be appearing in conversation at the South Bank Centre in London with the current president of Blue Note, Don Was. Later the same evening, stars from the label's present-day roster—young musicians who no doubt grew up, as Don Was did, "desperately want[ing] to be like the guys in the pictures [on Reid Miles's album sleeves]: wearing cool suits and hanging out in Van Gelder's studio with the black walls, saxophones, cigarette smoke and expensive-looking microphones"—will be celebrating the extraordinary legacy of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff at the Royal Festival Hall.
"Uncompromising Expression: Blue Note: 75 Years of The Finest in Jazz" by Richard Havers is published by Thames & Hudson (£48) www.thamesandhudson.com
EFG London Jazz Festival, 22nd November, South Bank Centre, London SE1, 6-7pm FREE: Author Richard Havers meets Blue Note President Don Was; 7.30pm, "Celebrating 75 Years of Blue Note", Royal Festival Hall, London SE1, www.efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk
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