The Soulful Truth: Blue Note

Well, here we have it, the first of hopefully many columns I will be writing for this blog, regarding the themes of the show I present on Sundays. Those of you who listened will know that the first show had no theme, instead it was a bit of everything. Well every show is going to have a bit of Blue Note, so it's fitting I write some about them, don't you think?

I won't give you a history on the label, or anything boring and work-inducing such as that.  Richard Cook has already done that pretty well.  No, the purpose of the "Soulful Truth" column is so that I can gove you guys a rundown on my feelings on the subject.  That's right.  I do this because Jazz & The Soulful Truth is subject to my bias, and so my ideas are really what matter.  If not, you wouldn't be hearing what you have heard, and will hear.  Makes sense?  If it didn't, well, you can ask me later why you'll never hear Wynton Marsalis on the show... 

Anyways, let's get back to Blue Note.  Well, simply put, they are awesome.  Always have been.  It's not just the great, generation-defining, mold-breaking jazz they religiously put out (meant both in past and present tense) that makes them great, but also their mojo.  They have style.  They have presence.  They look and sound cool, and believe me, a lot of the guys who played for them were far from cool.

Rudy van Gelder, the main engineer for the label had his studio built up in his house.  Francis Wolff, co-founder and sometimes producer, was also a brilliant photographer and would constantly photograph sessions to capture visually the mood only the Blue Note sound could conjure up.  And not surprisingly, these pictures showed up on the album covers, which brings me to the coolest of all "behind the scenes" guys at Blue Note: Reid Miles.

Reid Miles was the genius graphic designer who designed most of Blue Note's album covers, and defined, as far as I'm concerned, coolness on album jacket design.  The man was a wizard with graphics, pictures and even text.  One of my favourite covers, Larry Young's "Unity", features only a huge print of the word in black font against a white background, 4 red circles filling in the cavity in the letter 'U', and the musicians' names.  Yet I put on my Unity T-Shirt and it just screams out awesomeness. OK, maybe that was going too far, but it's a sweet cover, and an even sweeter record.

Unfortunately as the 70's came, Blue Note fell into some bad times, and I don't believe they ever really came back as healthy as that fertile period of late 50's early 60's records.  Although one must thank Mr. Michael Cuscuna and Rudy Van Gelder for having kept working on remastering these gems of sound. In the end, it doesn't really matter, because they became legendary.  There was reason for that.

You know, actually, I think that those guys playing for them just might have been the definition of cool.  Maybe everyone else just wasn't up to par.

Well, I'll leave it to your judgement when you listen to the show.

Keep Jazzin'

Mario