Blue Note Records

Within my first two years of being in business I got two big introductions to Blue Note records. The first came when a guy named Bob came into the store. I immediately recognized him as a guy who used to work at Kingbee records on Evans near D.U. He then went on to work at Record Revival (later Jazz Record Revival) on Broadway. He was always a nice guy and had recommended a few albums to me over the years that I really liked. This day he was selling a handful of CDs. He pointed one out to me. “You ever heard this one?” He shook his hand like he was putting out a match. “Hot Stuff.” The CD was Cornbread by Lee Morgan. I took it home that night and played it. It was indeed a magnificent jazz album. Morgan had such a strong tone and melodic sense on trumpet, his band was red hot and the recording was really present and snapped with the tight arrangements.

The second event came when someone dropped a stack of free magazines at the store. It was a guide to independent record stores nationally. I thumbed through it and was surprised to see our store in there. I’ll never forget it. They said we were a good store with a lot of nice used stuff. Then the author explained how he had gotten a couple of rare Blue Note pressings for way less than they were worth out of our racks. I was stung. Not by the loss of revenue, but at the perceived lack of knowledge. It changed the way I approached my job. I thought, if I’m going to do this, I have to know at least as much as the average customer (a ridiculous thought-there is no average customer).  It gave me a kick in the ass to both really learn about label variations and to understand better what the mystique was with Blue Note.

It took a few years before we got to the point that we were buying large collections every day, but it did finally happen, and I started to see some Blue Notes come through the door. A regular character who bought a lot of jazz named Shelby passed away and his family sold his records and he had a handful of great titles. They were beat to shit, but I decided to take a couple home and try them out. I will never forget the sense of revelation I had when I put that first original Blue Note pressing on my turntable and the exciting sound recording mastery thundered out of the speakers. I had never heard a record sound so alive! And remember this record looked like hell. Once the needle fell into those grooves, the scuffs and grime disappeared and, like magic, it sounded like you were in the studio with a room full of great players. I would learn this was no fluke. Blue Note records were largely recorded by a man named Rudy Van Gelder in his home in New Jersey. A dentist by trade, he loved jazz and sound, and he combined those two passions to create an undying legacy. The first generation or two of Blue Note are unparalleled recordings. Van Gelder’s abilities, the musicians, the times, and the pressing technology-I’m not sure exactly what all the factors were, but nothing sounds like a Blue Note.

A number of Blue Note recordings became some of my favorite albums. One in particular blew my mind. Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music is an incredible mix of jazz, funk, gospel and conscious soul unlike anything else. It is cosmic and earthy at the same time. It’s one of the records I’ve tried to turn people on to over the years. Finally, an original mono copy of Lee Morgan’s Cornbread came in to the store. I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited. I took it home that night and breathlessly put it on the box. I wish I had the words to convey exactly how amazing that first listen was. From the opening notes of Larry Ridley’s bass and that first blast of horns from Lee, Jackie McLean and Hank Mobley I couldn’t believe how present the music was. You could literally feel the room the album was recorded in. You could see where each player was in your mind’s eye. This was why I was collecting records. This exact feeling of presence-like you were there. I have played that record, I’ll bet, a thousand times. When people come over and want me to show off my stereo or collection, the night will always include Cornbread, usually with me holding the record up and saying “this is why we are still in business!” And I believe that. The specific magic contained in a well-pressed piece of vinyl is something that can not be undervalued. It is the medium through which the magic of music can best be expressed (short of live performance). After the many, many playings, Cornbread has lost none of that magic. The record still sounds amazing-no surface noise, just the pulse-quickening greatness of the original session. It is my go-to audiophile recording. Nothing sounds better to me.

The magic and mystery of Blue Note is well known in the collecting world. They are rare as hen’s teeth and highly sought after. Thus, the prices have become very “dear” as it were. Even so, if you see a nice one, and if you are excited by the art and science of recording, as well as great jazz-there is no more rewarding investment to be had in the record collecting world.

Here are some of my favorites.

I'd Love to Turn You On #147 - Mary Lou Williams – Zoning

The average jazz listener is likely to come up short if asked to name the jazz pianist who began their musical career in the 1920s and, aside from a couple breaks, didn’t stop performing until their death in 1981; who started out playing stride piano and writing big band arrangements; who played a role in helping many of the bebop players solidify their concepts; who encouraged the gospel of jazz – often literally – in both Europe and the U.S.; and who continually refined their approach to the music, including ideas that would even encompass events as far out as performing a controversial 1977 two-piano concert alongside unrepentant avant-gardist Cecil Taylor. A good (though incorrect) guess would be Duke Ellington, who covers most of the time span in question, but the correct answer is the underappreciated jazz great Mary Lou Williams.

Williams began playing piano at age 6 and by the time she was 19 she was writing arrangements for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy in Kansas City (and later New York), a gig she held until the early 40s when she began playing matron to the rising stars of bebop. From an interview for Melody Maker she noted "During this period Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around four or pick me up at the Café after I'd finished my last show, and we'd play and swap ideas until noon or later." Anyone who refers to Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell (to name only three of the musicians she coached and traded ideas with) “the kids” deserves a much greater status than Williams currently holds. But she didn’t just teach them, she took their ideas to heart and in her mid-40s work – notably 1945’s Zodiac Suite – you can hear bebop’s influence on her own playing.

In 1952, Williams began performing and living in Europe for two years, going on a hiatus from performing music upon her return to the States to focus on charity work within the Roman Catholic Church – specifically on helping addicted musicians kick drugs and return to performing. But by the late 50s, at the urging of two priests and Dizzy Gillespie, she returned to playing and before long was creating some of the most creative work of her career, blending her spiritual leanings with jazz, including two modernist masterworks: Mary Lou’s Mass and Black Christ of the Andes, both of which show an enormous grasp of different styles of music and a readiness to make her music challenging when she saw fit to do so.

After focusing mainly on live performances and working with children’s choirs throughout the rest of the 1960s the 70s found her recording in earnest, starting with the 1974 release, Zoning. It’s a great record, but that’s not all it is – like much of Williams’ latter-day work, this record encompasses a history of jazz that she was present for at every turn. Most of the record finds her working in one of two trios – a traditional piano-bass-drums group and contrasting with that a piano-bass-congas group – though on some cuts she plays solo, or in duo with one of the trio players. And on a couple cuts, she looks forward to her live date with Cecil Taylor by featuring a second pianist (Zita Carno) alongside her, creating some of the loosest, freest, and most abstract music on the record. It opens easy enough though, with the funky, driving bonus track “Syl-O-Gism” which was not on the original album. In listening, it’s difficult to imagine that anything but time constraints kept this off the record’s initial release. It’s followed immediately by Dizzy Gillespie’s lovely, reflective “Olinga,” featuring the same trio instrumentation, and that is in turn followed by “Medi II” which pushes the tempo back up to a rocketing speed. Williams’ interfacing with the bop crowd is readily evident in her playing here. The other bonus cut “Gloria” is the piano-bass-drums alternate version of the tune that occurs later in the disc and again – quality is not in question; it can only be the physical limitations of putting music on an LP that kept this slower version of the tune off the original release. Two dual-piano tracks follow: “Intermission” finds Williams and Carno working in unison before stretching out on this fragmentary and impressionistic tune, but the oddly-titled “Zoning Fungus” opens with a very loose and abstract pianos-only intro before the rhythm section drops in a tight groove for them to work against. The record is then given over to two piano/bass duos, with Mary Lou and Bob Cranshaw playing the lovely “Holy Ghost” and the bluesier and sometimes mildly dissonant “Medi I.” The bluesiness of “Medi I” gives way to the slow, funky, in the pocket groove of “Rosa Mae” which in turn leads to the impressionistic solo piano ballad “Ghost of Love.” The three tracks that close out the record all feature the piano-bass-congas trio, starting with the fastest number here: “Praise the Lord,” in which the rhythm section sets up a fast tempo then Williams drops into it and effortlessly finds her place. She’s not often given to showy runs in her solos, preferring instead to hitting the right note or phrase at exactly the right time – not unlike that “kid” Monk that she used to talk with. The originally released version of “Gloria” follows, faster than the earlier one on the album, and every bit as good and fun. The record closes with “Play It Momma,” a slow groover that is – as usual – funky and showcases Williams’ exquisite timing. A perfect ending to a great album.

Williams would make more records through the remainder of the 1970s (many of them worth seeking out), teach music at Duke University, perform at the White House, create the Mary Lou Williams Foundation to help the underprivileged and young find their way to jazz, and then pass away in 1981 of bladder cancer. In her biography Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams she would sum up her long and accomplished life with this simple statement that says it better than anything I could add: "I did it, didn't I? Through muck and mud."

-         Patrick Brown

I'd Love to Turn You On #114 - Cecil Taylor - The World of Cecil Taylor

Don’t be afraid of Cecil Taylor; he won’t hurt you, he just wants to make beautiful music. He’s earned a reputation as a challenging jazz musician, instrumental (along with Ornette Coleman) in ushering in “free jazz” in the 50’s and 60’s. But mostly the music that’s made him notorious came later than this, after a 1962 breakthrough where he found rhythm sections ready to go out on a limb with him and try something new. In the years leading up to that from his 1957 debut Jazz Advance, through the great 1958 release Looking Ahead! to his 1959 albums Hard Driving Jazz (later issued under John Coltrane’s name as Coltranetime) and Love For Sale, Taylor charted a course that challenged some but still worked within the boundaries of what people referred to as jazz, mainly held to the earth by solid bass and drum support. But after fairly indifferent sales for those albums he connected with the jazz writer Nat Hentoff, whose position as A&R man at the newly formed Candid Records meant that he could sign and give artistic freedom to a number of musicians working outside the mainstream of jazz. And Taylor didn’t waste the opportunity, producing several albums’ worth of material over a few recording sessions in October 1960 and January 1961, starting with this release. As with the titles of his first couple records (or Ornette’s similarly forward-thinking The Shape of Jazz To Come or Change of the Century) Taylor’s title promises a new world and a new approach to jazz here and he delivers it.

Though earlier on in his career Taylor took flack from critics unwilling to give his new music a shot, by this time he didn't really have anything more to prove to anybody - you take him seriously if you hear him play, simple as that. You may not like it, but there's no denying that he's for real. The record kicks off with “Air” where drummer Dennis Charles announces the opening with a drum fanfare into which Cecil drops a

thoroughly discordant but rhythmically solid (albeit tricky) melody. Charles and bassist Buell Neidlinger come back in with a cooking rhythm and the young saxophonist Archie Shepp takes the lead solo (two years before his debut album), sounding somewhat tentative here with Taylor comping menacingly behind him – or maybe that’s me projecting because when Taylor takes the lead Shepp's hesitant take on things is blown out of the memory within a few seconds, as he dissects the rhythm like a master surgeon, and plays around a tonal idea and stays challenging and dissonant without going completely atonal and aleatoric. Taylor and Charles trade off phrases as the piece draws to a close and Shepp reappears to say goodbye – but he’ll be back for the closing track, don’t worry. Next up is the lovely Rodgers & Hammerstein ballad "This Nearly Was Mine" (from South Pacific), performed as a trio with Neidlinger and Charles. In Cecil's hands it retains its beauty but it's edgy and works the extremes of the instrument and can jangle your nerves if you're the sort to let it get under your skin instead of immersing yourself. But if you immerse, you will find yourself right in his world. We also have "Port of Call," a Taylor original that's got a nice melodic line (which of course he immediately clutters up and subjects to changes) and might be the most accessible thing here for a listener looking for something more traditionally jazzy to hook into, though Taylor’s pixellated solo still may rattle the unwary. Following that is "E.B.," probably my favorite piece of the set. It's again a trio and is taken at a rocketing tempo with Dennis Charles working alongside Taylor's subversions of the riff that characterizes the piece in a way that reminds me of Blakey and Monk's interplay on Monk's underrated tune "Introspection." All the while Buell Neidlinger drives fiercely underneath and provides a grounding to even Taylor's wildest moments of solo flight. Closing things is the ballad "Lazy Afternoon" where Shepp acquits himself with a nice solo and some good back and forth with Cecil - still not quite in Taylor's league (to be fair, hardly anyone is), but he simply sounds great here, craggy tone and all - and helps make the piece work. Taylor of course takes what could be a languid stroll through an old tune and makes it something altogether more interesting while the rhythm mainly steers clear and lets him fly, especially in the opening improvisation.

            All in all, the album is a great way in to Taylor's music, a nice balance of accessible and complex, and one of his finest early records – possibly the best of all his pre-1962 albums. From here he’d get more challenging as he found players open to his unique rhythmic and harmonic approach, but the early years are a fascinating glimpse of how Taylor could make his ideas work within a relatively traditional framework. The friction of his striving often left behind some great work.

            - Patrick Brown