Jazz label looks back, forward
Virtually every great jazz musician to emerge during the genre’s pinnacle in the ’50s and early ’60s was recorded on Blue Note Records. As the landmark label celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, a bright, engaging documentary from Swiss filmmaker Sophie Huber brings the record company’s story into the 21st century, as hiphop musicians plumb the Blue Note catalog for beats and more cosmic inspiration, connecting to rich cultural resources and the mother lode of modern jazz.
Founded in 1939 by two German Jewish immigrants fleeing the lengthening shadow of the Nazis, Blue Note introduced a staggering parade of musical giants — Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Art Blakey, Horace Silver and Miles Davis, among many others. Huber frames her “Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes” around a 2014 recording session in the historic Capitol Studios in Hollywood with a pride of young lions of jazz joined by two Blue Note pioneers — pianist Herbie Hancock and saxophonist Wayne Shorter — once themselves young lions of jazz, now elder statesmen.
While the vast legacy of the music from the label’s early days continues to appreciate — and Hancock and Shorter make excellent spokesmen for the oldschool jazz musicians — it is the young musicians such as pianist Robert Glasper and trumpeter and Oakland native Ambrose Akinmusire who put the music in context and are pushing it into new, exciting shapes. They make a compelling case that jazz, once considered headed for the cultural graveyard, is back, refreshed and restored, alive and well.
After founders Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff sold the label at low tide for the music in 1967 to Liberty Records, a Hollywood company best known for surf records by Jan and Dean, torch ballads by Julie London, and ersatz Hawaiian music by Martin Denny, the label veered into more lightweight, jukeboxfriendly fare, disappearing altogether by the end of the ’70s, only to be revived in 1985 after EMI purchased Liberty, with respected veteran record executive Bruce Lundvall in charge of the label.
Lundvall signed songwriter Norah Jones, whose 2002 Blue Note debut sold more than 20 million copies. Today, the label is overseen by record producer Don Was (Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, B52s), currently around town playing with Bob Weir in the Wolf Brothers. He has guided the label’s continued growth since 2012 and serves an agreeable cheerleading role in the documentary.
The film burbles with an endless stream of beautiful jazz and the stark, penetrating session photographs by Blue Note principal Wolff brilliantly illuminate the visuals. Filmmaker Huber tells the story of the label in relatively straightforward documentary fashion; it is the young jazz musicians in the film, articulate, committed and focused, who take the topic into intellectually provocative realms, linking the label’s music with the rise of hiphop and the evolution of African American musical culture in general.
“Jazz in in the ’50s and ’60s used to tell the stories of the inner cities,” Akinmusire says. “And then there was a time after that when it stopped doing that. And then hiphop in the ’80s came around and that was the thing that told the stories of the inner cities all of a sudden.”
It doesn’t qualify as a surprise ending, but it does lift the documentary out of the purely historical into a treatise that points to the future of jazz, a future that was hardly assured as recently as 20 years ago. In the hands of these gifted, dedicated musicians, it has never looked better.