Blue Note: Uncompromising Expression covers jazz label's first 75 years
Richard Havers' book recalls A new book takes note of 75 years of the American jazz label, writes Peter Conrad.
by Richard Havers
Thames & Hudson
A blue note is a flattened or - in the terminology of jazz - a "worried" note, which dips below the major scale to vouch for the intensity of an emotion. Blue Note is a record label which, since its foundation 75 years ago, has recorded the bluest and most worried jazz performers.
Shaded by nocturnal melancholy, blue is the preferred tonality of their music. Miles Davis' classic 1959 album was titled Kind of Blue, and Blue Note recorded guitarist Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue (1963), attuned to the mood of a moonlit sky seen through the glare of streetlights.
Uncompromising Expression, the phrase from Blue Note's mission statement that Richard Havers applies to his lavishly illustrated history of the label, also serves as a definition of jazz. Duke Ellington actually proposed renaming the music played by his band, because "jazz" to him was a smutty synonym for having sex. He described his repertoire as "the American idiom" or "music of the freedom of expression".
Yet as Havers explains, that American idiom - used, like abstract expressionist painting, as propaganda for go-getting Yankee liberties during the cold war - owed its preservation on records to a Berliner. Blue Note was founded in 1939 by Alfred Lion, the son of a Jewish architect who settled in New York in 1933 after fleeing the Third Reich. Lion slept rough at first in Central Park, and when he could afford to rent a room he installed a Victrola gramophone to play the jazz records he bought on excursions uptown to Harlem.
In Adolf Hitler's Germany, jazz was reviled as "negermusik", a savage din. Escaping to America, Lion heard in bop, boogie-woogie and honky-tonk a rowdy proof of his adopted country's impromptu, endlessly self-renovating energy. That faith persisted even after he gave up control of Blue Note in 1966, and it was proclaimed all over again in 1986 by Spontaneous Inventions, a collection of "vocal gymnastics" in which Bobby McFerrin teamed up with the manic Robin Williams, who scatted, rapped and wordlessly burbled through a track called Beverly Hills Blues. The result was not so much spontaneous invention as demented free association.