A new voice

One such time was January, 2001. Bruce Lundvall had his feet on his desk, staring at the gold discs framed on the wall. He had taken on a huge exec job at Columbia Records on condition that, as a side hustle, he could run Blue Note. Friends were calling it “Suicide Note”. But he loved Blue Note. It was a big part of why he was in the music business at all.

His finance director had asked him to see someone. His FD never, ever, asked him to see people. So, Bruce was curious.

She was neatly dressed and polite. Modest, but not shy. There was something very calm and centred behind that gentle face. Said her name was Norah Jones and that she was 21. Yes, she had brought a tape.

“Come Away With Me” came whispering through the huge speakers.

Bruce went cold. It was The Moment. The lightning bolt that every producer dreams of. When you hear something that you know is truly great and that nobody in the world has heard yet. Something that will be wedding music, proposal music, funeral music. Something that millions of people will hear for three minutes then hold in their hearts for the rest of their lives.

Bruce then did an extraordinary thing. Something that surprised even him. He said that this song was too big for Blue Note. It was a mainstream song, in the right hands, it could be a huge hit. He was going to walk Norah across to 550 Madison to meet the President of Columbia Records. This was a huge song that belonged on a huge label.

Politely, but very firmly, Norah said no. She loved Blue Note. All her favourite artists were on Blue Note. She had only ever dreamed of being a Blue Note artist. Didn’t want anything else. “And if I only sell 12 records on Blue Note at least I’ll know that every one of these records was listened to, very, very carefully.”

“Come Away With Me” was released, on Blue Note, in 2002. Norah’s 12 records sold in seconds, then 27 million more. 8 Grammys, including Best Album and Best Song. Norah Jones is a global star.

Today and tomorrow

Today’s President is Don Was, legendary producer and musician with Iggy Pop, Ziggy Marley, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.
He was quick to see the vinyl revival coming and surfed it with some quality reissues. Blue Note recordings respond especially well on audiophile 180-gram vinyl.

But the label had a problem. Hip hop artists were lifting huge samples from Blue Note classics, especially the great bass lines.

Legal was drafting writs, but Don Was thought that this was “just not a Blue Note thing to do”. Instead, he did the opposite. He opened the doors to a legendary series of collaborations, with albums from A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Nas.

Today, the label is as revered in the hip hop world as it is in jazz. (The logo is one of the most requested stencils at Harlem Tattoo on 125th.)

The look

“I wanted people to hear the record just by looking at the sleeve”

For more than a decade, mid-’50s to mid-’60s, a single designer, Reid Miles, was the look of Blue Note. He was freelance, with a day job, so most of the work was done at night or over the weekend. For $50 a sleeve, he produced more than 500 album designs, a string of classics that have never been surpassed.

He was fast. For the logo, he compressed a semiquaver into a rectangle over an oval to create a beautiful modernist classic. One thousand albums later, it still holds up. Now, it always will.

He had quite an eye. In 1958 he found an interesting young illustrator for the Kenny Burrell album. When the drawing was delivered, the artist had signed it, like an Old Master. Reid Miles thought the signature looked cool, so he left it on. Andy Warhol was, by all accounts, very grateful for the publicity.

Miles approached type the way the musicians played — his style could be called free-form improv. Fonts created patterns. Words could change size in mid-sentence. Names could be stretched, inverted, reflected or completely fragmented.

Mostly, Miles worked on Francis Wolff’s shots of the artists. Wolff prowled the studio during the sessions. A professional photographer in Germany, the Bauhaus had taught him to use a twin-lens Rolleiflex which, with its top-down viewpoint, gave him a low angle that was perfect for the intimacy of the small studio. With the new Kodak Tri-X film, which could be rated at 400 ASA, he had everything he needed to work in the confined, dark space. The result was a series of jazz portraits that are a benchmark in photography, as great as any ever taken.

Reid Miles didn’t treat these classics with the reverence and respect that galleries do today. As far as he was concerned, they were just another graphic asset. He cropped radically, ran shots at random angles, washed the lovingly illuminated black-and-whites with transparent tints and laced type through the image. Wolff regularly exploded when he saw the designs. The louder he shouted the more German he became. If Reid Miles ever heard him, he gave no sign.

“I wanted people to hear the record just by looking at the sleeve.”

Blue Note fans will say that he did just that. What makes it even more surprising is that the designer didn’t much care for the music. Preferring classical, he was always “more Mozart than Miles Davis”.

The odd couple

And yet, while the brand is dripping with cool, the men who created it certainly were not. In their baggy cardigans with leather elbow patches, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff could pass for German geography teachers. Lion’s accent, which 30 years in America did nothing to soften, sounded like a tourist in a comedy. Francis Wolff would dance in the studio during the sessions. The musicians thought his dad dancing was hysterical. What was he listening to? Where was he finding that beat? It sure wasn’t anything they were playing.

But these two oddball refugees commissioned and produced some of the finest music ever recorded, packaged and presented in a design style that’s taught in schools and collected by museums.

Lion and Wolff were friends in Berlin. In 1939 they met up again in New York where they had both come to escape the darkening clouds that were gathering over Germany. In Berlin they’d been part of the bohemian cultural scene, where they had encountered real jazz. They loved the music, it spoke to them of freedom, liberty and a wonderful release from the stuffy claustrophobia of high German culture.

In 1939, they made the first Blue Note recording.

Right from the start, their approach was very different to any other record label. It was all about the music, the money didn’t matter. As long as they had the cash to fund another session, they would keep recording.
From the beginning they paid for rehearsals, which was completely unknown at that time. For jazz, which depends on improvisation, this was priceless. It allowed the musicians to play in before they had to address the mic.

And they treated the musicians with affection and respect. They ate together, sharing sandwiches and beers. For jazz musicians, this was very different. White folks just didn’t do that. Certainly not the guys who owned the studio. You played in the ballroom, but you ate in the kitchen. And this wasn’t a heavy-handed attempt at inclusion, it was just the way Lion and Wolff were. Two people in love with music, who couldn’t play it but who certainly could create a place where it could be created and captured. It was all about the music.

The great drummer Art Blakey, raised as an orphan on the hard streets of Pittsburgh, who knew what the dark side of the American dream looked like, said simply “They were one of us.” He recorded with Blue Note for 35 years.

And the musicians, even the most demanding, absolutely trusted their judgement. Lion was famous for his studio direction “It must schwing. Where is the schwing?”. The players knew that if Lion was nodding along and Wolff was “dancing”, they had a take.

Lion and Wolff had an uncanny ear for authenticity. They wanted the real thing. Although they are now legends, most of the musicians on Blue Note had been flatly rejected by major studios. Their music was too difficult. Thelonious Monk was a classic case. The label kept recording him for five years, during which time there was no audience at all for his challengingly idiosyncratic piano.

The big labels found the new jazz musicians impossible. John Coltrane and Miles Davis weren’t interested in repeating things that had worked before. They refused to churn out new versions of old hits. The labels thought they were difficult and demanding. Blue Note didn’t. They saw perfectionists, who were trying to create something that nobody had ever heard before. The musicians couldn’t tell you what it was, but they would know it when they found it.

Come the revolution.

On June the 21st, 1948, the world of music changed forever. And it wasn’t a composer or performer that changed it. It was technology. Because that was the day when Columbia Records released the first LP record. This was a revolution. Now the customers control the music. Before this you could only wait to find it on the radio or, much more rarely, hear it live. Most people would only hear a favourite song or tune half a dozen times in their lifetime. Our relationship with music was changed forever.

And music didn’t just sound different, it looked different too. The new LPs had something called sleeves. These would go on to become an art in themselves.

The product

The Blue Note sound is legendary.

Of all the surprising things about Blue Note, perhaps the most surprising was the studio they worked in. It was the living room in Rudy van Gelder’s parents’ home. It was the most ordinary suburban street in the world, but at 25 Prospect Ave in Hackensack, New Jersey, history was made on a regular basis.

In the afternoon his parents would move the furniture back against the walls whilst van Gelder set up his recording gear. The TV, the sideboard, the coffee table, the standard lamps. There’s a famous image of Miles Davis, looking moody as only Miles could, studying his Martin Committee horn with Rudy’s mother’s TV in the background. Other shots show legendary musicians jamming in front of what look like living room curtains. Because that’s what they were.

The lineup of musicians who swung their instrument cases down that narrow white suburban street was absolutely astonishing.
John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey. Every day, giants got off the train and turned left into Prospect Ave. A local librarian was irritated by a passenger “rattling” drumsticks on the back of a seat: she breathed a sigh of relief when Max Roach got off at Hackensack.

397 sessions were laid down in that front room. Musicians think they are some of the finest jazz recordings ever made. Sound engineers just think they are some of the finest recordings ever made.

Rudy van Gelder was a part-time, self-taught sound engineer. His day job was as an optometrist. “A boffin-like genius who brought a scientific mindset and forensic attention to detail to the art of audio recording” (udiscovermusic.com, Van Gelder and the Blue Note Sound)

Van Gelder used German valve microphones. Nothing else would do. They were placed for each player with the precision of a tailor-made suit. Obsessively protective of his secrets, he concealed the brand names on all of his equipment with duct tape. He always wore rubber gloves. No-one was ever allowed to touch his system. And no-one did, because the sound was perfect. Musicians still talk about “the Hackensack sound” eighty years later. The clarity, tone and nuance of these instruments, packed together in a low-ceilinged room, produced something magical that has never been equalled or matched.

“I just tried to let these people be heard in the way they wanted to be heard.”
(Rudy van Gelder, Perfect Takes)

In its ninth decade, Blue Note keeps doing what it has always done, using music to describe the world.

Quartets have their own mystique in jazz — the sum will always be greater than the total of the parts. But surely none is as random as the four who created Blue Note. Two nerdy German avant-gardists, an eccentric sound engineer and a designer who didn’t much like the music. This improbable combo left the world a glorious legacy of sound.

And, yes, you can hear the music just by looking at the sleeves.