Let freedom ring
The legendary jazz label celebrates its 80th anniversary with a new documentary that looks beyond its past. By Andrew Male.
Blue Note Records ★★★★ Beyond The Notes EAGLE VISION. DVD
HERE IS a point in this thoughtful and complex history of Blue Note Records where the pianist, composer and label mainstay Herbie Hancock is asked to define what made this particular jazz label so special. “It caught the players’ humanity,” he says. “Hope and freedom. The fight, the internal struggle, the expression of what’s inside.”
Officially sanctioned by Blue Note and overseen by the label’s current president, Don Was, this anniversary celebration might so easily have been another bare-bones hagiography, a promo advert made to satisfy shareholders and generate publicity for the next round of reissues. However, director Sophie Huber sees a bigger picture and instead gives us a film that presents the label as the inner voice of ’60s Black America.
“Blue Note captured the heart of the individuals
Tcreating the music,” continues Hancock. “A heart that was affected by the times.”
Co-founded in 1939 by German-Jewish immigrants Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, Blue Note was unlike the other jazz labels at the time, in so much as it was run out of a love for the music, not a quest for profit. Fleeing Nazism for a new life in the US, Lion and Wolff (“the animal brothers”) also wanted Blue Note to be a home for artistic freedom, equality and dialogue, values which chimed with musicians such as Hancock, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Lou Donaldson. Donaldson is interviewed, along with fellow label veteran Wayne Shorter, and they show nothing but respect for the GermanJewish duo. “I loved both of them,” says Donaldson. “The other jazz labels were just cheap white scoundrels.”
Huber’s masterstroke, however, is to centre the documentary around a modernday session by the Blue Note All Stars, featuring such contemporary jazzers as keyboardist Robert Glasper, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, saxophonist Marcus Strickland, guitarist Lionel Loueke, bassist Derrick Hodge, drummer Kendrick Scott and producer Terrace Martin.
It’s Glasper and co who underline the freedom and struggle that they hear in those iconic Blue Note sessions and connect the label’s inner-city ’60s sound to the ’80s birth of hip-hop, and recent releases such as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly.
“1960s Blue Note never sounded like defeat,” says Hodge, but it’s Martin who points out that in the 1970s the label stopped speaking about the inner cities, and with the death of funded music programmes in urban areas, “all that was left was the records. We fell in love with jazz through hip-hop.”
Rich in information, with tantalising access to historical recording sessions, archive chatter and Francis Wolff’s glowing archive photos, Huber’s film ticks all the boxes for anyone hoping to luxuriate in a straight history, but its ultimate significance is that it recognises the label’s continuing cultural importance for new jazz voices in today’s political climate.
“What I learned from Blue Note is you’ve got to do music to soothe the times,” says Terrace Martin. “I mean, I might get pulled over by the police and killed tomorrow.”
“Other labels were cheap white scoundrels.” LOU DONALDSON