Attaboy

This weekend, I had the great pleasure to stumble upon a fascinating documentary on one of America’s great, and often neglected art forms.

Blue Note: A Story of Modern Jazz appeared Saturday afternoon on the BET cable channel. I had to run out, so thank God again for the incredible TiVo, which began its work with the push of one button. The film was produced for European television in 1997, and tells the story of Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff, two German immigrants who emigrated to the U.S. at the start of WWII, and eventually began documenting, on records, some of the greatest moments in jazz by some of the genre’s greatest practitioners.

Lion did the bulk of the work getting the artists in the studio and recording, while Wolff worked on the promotional side, creating many of the photographs that would adorn Blue Note album covers during the label’s peak creative period from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Lion didn’t make a lot of money with his little company for some years. But what he did changed the course of how modern jazz was recorded and marketed to the public. Lion had no fear of signing and recording an artist considered too far out for other companies, such as Bud Powell and Theolonious Monk. Through his willingness to highlight these artists, Lion and Blue Note hold a major responsibility for the introduction of the bebop style of jazz to the world. Bebop emerged from the experimentation during the 1940s of musicians like Powell and Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Max Roach and others. The movement carried jazz away from the traditional large band ensemble to smaller quartets and quintets, where the individual musicians would stretch out on long, improvisational solos, working the boundaries of scale, chord structure and harmonics.

Lion and Wolff’s great love for the music enabled them to create a long document of modern jazz in America. Many of the recordings on the Blue Note label, especially from the 1950s, are considered the standards by which other jazz is measured. Some of the greatest musicians in jazz went on to successful careers with other labels (John Coltrane with Atlantic and Impulse, Miles Davis with Columbia, Monk with Prestige). But all of them, as well as dozens of other monumental artists, made some of their more important recordings for Blue Note.

I recall that the first Blue Note LP i ever purchased was Dexter Gordon’s Go, something I wanted to hear at a time when I was just discovering jazz myself. Like the many other Blue Note sessions I’ve owned over the years, this one didn’t disappoint. What is kind of sad, all these years later, is that outside of a limited audience, mostly jazz afficianados, this style of music is practically ignored by the general public. I can understand why, sometimes. Jazz isn’t always danceable, the jazz singers don’t often sound close to the giants of the pop charts (which can be a goodthing, actually), and the music requires the willingness to sometimes just sit and listen. Improvisational styles can be random and unplanned; one can never tell, especially in a live show, where a musician might take a particular piece of music. That, for me, is what’s so grand about this music. I still find it amazing that a group of people can get into a studio and produce such sounds, much of which is coming from their heads spontaneously. This isn’t music to play in the background; this forces you to listen, intelligently.

I don’t know how often this documentary appears on the tube, though I believe it’s available on video tape somewhere. If you have the opportunity to see it, do so. In fact, don’t wait. Go search out some of the music. You might find, as I did back in the 1970s, that your life can be changed.