Cuscuna, the record producer, continued to reissue a handful of items from the back catalog, but for the better part of a decade, the label released no new albums. In the late 1970s, the higher-ups at EMI - which had acquired Liberty’s catalog - let Blue Note wind down. Many have not aged particularly well, though some - like Donald Byrd’s “Black Byrd” and Bobbi Humphrey’s “Blacks and Blues” - caught the spirit of the times, and became hits. Jazz’s popularity was on the wane, and under new supervision Blue Note’s output took a turn toward airy funk records. “They were hearing this music not only as music,” he says, “but as a valued treasure.”īy the mid-60s, Lion’s deteriorating health led him and Wolff to sell the label to Liberty Records, which was quickly acquired by an insurance company. Shorter recalls that Lion and Wolff were openly hostile to commercial imperatives, but aware of the music’s real worth. In “Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes,” a thoughtful documentary looking at Blue Note’s first 80 years and its present day, Mr. Jazz musicians now have to be improvisers deeply trained in the American tradition, with roots in the blues. “Jazz” today encompasses an entire ocean of post-collegiate musical work: highbrow traditionalism, renegade funk, droning free improvisations. Since the 1960s, the label has been through numerous corporate mergers, partial shutdowns and creative readjustments, all while working to keep pace with shifts that have left jazz in a state of diffusion: Much of its forward motion is happening on the fringes, and there’s hardly a mainstream sound to speak of. It’s been a long time since that fantasy was a reality - for jazz or for Blue Note, which turns 80 this year. Think of a modernist, cobalt-hued album cover, with blocky title text and a photo of a studious young musician hunkered over an instrument, and you’re envisioning the Blue Note look. Imagine a smoky room with a horn player blowing fiercely over a strolling standup bass, and you’re hearing the Blue Note sound. The name Blue Note Records calls to mind a once-regnant sound in jazz: the hard-bop of the 1950s and ’60s, with its springy four-beat swing rhythm, its spare-but-lush horn harmonies, its flinty, percussive piano playing.
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