Blue Note is a jazz record label founded in New York in 1939 by Alfred Lion, soon joined by Francis Wolff. Both had emigrated from Berlin, fleeing Nazism. Its sessions produced decisive records by Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock, and its covers designed by Reid Miles defined an aesthetic. Few labels sum up the history of modern jazz so well.
Alfred Lion discovered jazz as a teenager in Berlin. Settled in New York, he attended the From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall in December 1938 and weeks later organised his first recording session, with the boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis. So Blue Note was born, in January 1939.
That same year his boyhood friend Francis Wolff, a photographer, arrived from Berlin. Together they ran the label for decades, under a motto that was also a promise: the finest in jazz since 1939. One of their first successes was Summertime by the clarinettist and soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet.
Blue Note was the first label to record Thelonious Monk extensively, between 1947 and 1952, when his music still baffled much of the critical establishment. That gamble defined the house character: record the musicians it believed in, before the public caught up with them.
In the fifties and sixties, the label became synonymous with hard bop: Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan and his hit The Sidewinder, John Coltrane's Blue Train, Herbie Hancock albums such as Maiden Voyage. A good part of the modern jazz canon carries its imprint.
The Blue Note sound owes much to the engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who recorded in his New Jersey studio with a clarity and warmth recognisable in an instant. Lion also paid for rehearsal days before each session, an unusual luxury that can be heard in the precision of the records.
The image was created by Reid Miles, author of hundreds of covers of bold typography and almost architectural composition, and by Francis Wolff, whose black and white session photographs fixed for ever the look of the jazz of those years. Those sleeves are studied in design schools today.
Lion and Wolff sold the label in the mid-sixties and the imprint faded until it was nearly dormant. In 1985 it was relaunched under Bruce Lundvall, who reissued the catalogue and signed new artists.
In 2002, the worldwide success of Norah Jones opened another chapter, and since 2012 the producer Don Was has led the house, which continues to record leading figures of today's jazz. The story of its founders, two emigrants who turned a passion into a catalogue, has inspired books and documentaries.
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