Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes

Jazz isn't for everyone, but I think just about everyone would enjoy the film Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, which was given a showing at the Trylon Theater the other day. 

It's about jazz, as seen through the careers of two Jewish emigres from Germany, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, who decide to start a record company devoted to the genre simply because they like the music. During the 1950s and '60s the label they founded, Blue Note, was one of several that specialized in jazz—a slightly more popular genre then than it is today. I'm not a scholar of the era by any stretch of the imagination, but I bought quite a few LPs in the 60s issued by Blue Note, along with others put out by Riverside, Prestige, Verve, Columbia, and Impulse, without distinguishing overmuch between them. Sound engineer Rudy van Gelder appears on so many of them that I got to recognize the name, but Lion and Wolff never made an impression.

In the course of this film, director Sophie Huber introduces us to these two gentlemen, who liked the music without claiming to "understand" it, treated the musicians well, paid for rehearsal time as well as recording time, and in other ways stood slightly apart from the pack. Blue Note jacket covers, designed by Reid Miles making use of photos Wolff took during studio sessions, are instantly recognizable fifty years after the fact--several coffee table books have been devoted to them--and the musicians involved include some of the era's greats: Trane, Miles, McCoy, Joe Henderson, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock.

Lion was an early champion of Thelonious Monk, and he devoted six sessions to recording the pianist before arriving at material he considered worth releasing. Monk's jarring harmonies were never that popular with the public, but Lion didn't care.

Alongside those artists now considered the core of modern jazz, Lion and Wolff—the "animal brothers"—also recorded more avant garde musicians, including Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, but that fact doesn't change the narrative much, and Huber naturally prefers to explore the connections between the hard-bop and modal jazz of the golden age and Blue Note's reincarnation during the 1990s as a label willing to back efforts by musicians to bring jazz and hip-hop traditions together. 

Lou Donaldson, a soul jazz giant of the 50s and 60s, has some wry stories to tell about working with Wolff and Lion during Blue Notes early years, and young pianist Robert Glasper and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire join Hancock and Shorter in the studio with current Blue Note producer Don Was to chat while doing a few takes of Shorter's "Masqualero."

One gets the impression that some of the younger musicians don't entirely "get" jazz, and the associations they make between 60s jazz and the Civil Rights Movement are slightly misguided in the present context. On the other hand, artists about whom I know nothing, like Kendrick Scott and hip-hop producer Terrance Marti, are clearly getting things out of those classic sides, and I suppose I ought to direct more of my attention their way to see what they've found.

The film leaves several questions unanswered, and ought not to be scrutinized too closely. For example, if Blue Note was so great, why did most of the musicians move on to other labels? And how could it be that the label finally went under as a result of two mega-hits, Lee Morgan's "Sidewinder" and Horace Silver's "Song for My Father"?

Such quibbles aside, the film remains a delight from beginning to end, not only because of the ebullient sound track, the stunning black and white graphics, and the articulate analysis, but also because the gentle souls of Lion and Wolff can be felt throughout. They were long gone by the time Nora Jones signed with Blue Note in 2002, but here, fifteen years later, she's still raving about the artistic freedom the label gives her.

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Back home, we popped a frozen pizza into the oven, I uncorked a bottle of wine, and then started digging through stacks of CDs in search of Blue Note material. From the early days I came up with Thelonious Monk: Genius of Modern Music, volume 1, which was recorded in 1947. Wayne Shorter's Without a Net appeared in 2013. I rounded up 21 CDs in all, and was a little surprised to find that quite a few were from recent times: Don Pullen, Greg Osby, Bill Charlap, Sonny Fortune. Sticking to the old stuff featured in the film, I dropped Monk's early efforts into the player, then an album from 1960, Art Blakey's A Night in Tunisia. It's a spirited bunch of tracks, but thrashing and poundy, and it belies drummer Blakey's claim in the film that he never wanted to be a leader. 

Then on to Joe Henderson and Kenny Dorham. Page One. We were listening with fresh ears. We were groovin' high.