Dixon on Blue Note

[Nate Dorward]

Can't imagine this says anything that's news to folks here, but FWIW. This was the front-page story for the Globe & Mail's Review section today.

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Is Blue Note striking off key?

By signing acts such as Norah Jones, Van Morrison and Al Green, critics are worried the prestigious jazz label has turned its back on its tradition, GUY DIXON writes

By GUY DIXON


The hard bop saxophonist Hank Mobley is wearing a knit blazer, possibly Brooks Brothers, which on anyone else would have carried hopelessly conformist, Father Knows Best undertones.But in dark Ray-Bans under the album's title No Room For Squares, the photograph of Mobley by Francis Wolff channels everything that was hip then in the world. And as purveyors of cool iconography, Mobley's label Blue Note Records may have been the hippest of them all.

Mobley is shot through a round piece of minimalist decor, creating the effect of a smoke ring around his face. There's also Mobley's long and manicured nail on his middle finger protruding under the cigarette held to his mouth -- all subtle, key details juxtaposed against the unsettled, happy-discordance of his music and all are part of Blue Note's legacy.

Then there's Dexter Gordon's Our Man in Paris, one of jazz's most genius allusions given that Gordon was based in Europe at the time. Gordon is in Harry Belafonte mode, looking like a model foreign correspondent, as the album whiles away with Gordon's loose-embouchure, down-home lyricism and pianist Bud Powell's gifted self-assuredness.

Today, Blue Note has singer and pianist Norah Jones looking wistfully downward on the cover of her second album, Feels Like Home, with songs likely to continue her country-tinged, intimate cabaret style. Although she was trained as a jazz musician, few serious jazz fans consider her one. What does this mean for Blue Note's image?

The label's other top releases by soul singer Al Green and folk rock stalwart Van Morrison are even further removed from traditional jazz. Is Blue Note running the risk of turning its jazz background into a kind of classy accoutrement, a seal of quality in order to sell pop records?

"No, I think Blue Note has maintained its tradition. We have in my opinion the best jazz roster [of new acts] of any jazz label," said Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall, not surprisingly.

Yet Jones's success breeds a similar kind of success. When Lundvall signed Jones immediately upon hearing her demo tape, he expected her to record an album of jazz standards, he said. But with her vague move toward country ballads and the massive success of that debut album, Come Away With Me, other acts that are barely within the parameters of anything remotely to do with jazz have also beaten a path to Blue Note's door.

"I've had everyone from Kenny Loggins to rap acts wanting to be on Blue Note. I certainly drew the line [with those]. But what happened with Van Morrison is that he said directly to me, I've never been a rock and roll artist. I've always been a blues and jazz artist. I will not be with your company [Blue Note's parent label EMI] unless I can be on Blue Note. And what am I going to say? No?" Lundvall laughed. "And the same thing happened with Al Green. He said, I want to be on Blue Note."

The label will have to see if other artists looking to be signed by EMI make similar demands, he added. But he insisted that Blue Note isn't looking to increase its roster of non-jazz acts. He also noted that since Jones came aboard, the label has signed banner jazz names Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard.

In the past, especially in the hard bop and post-bop fifties and sixties, there was the deluge of Blue Note titles, all classics of the genre and which are continually re-emerging as CD reissues: McCoy Tyner's The Real McCoy, Horace Silver's Song For My Father, Andrew Hill's Smokestack, Donald Byrd's Slow Drag, Bobby Hutcherson's Stick-Up! Each carry the indelible Blue Note stamp -- clear, mid-20th-century bop delivered by legendary recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder and minimalist album cover artwork by designer Reid Miles. Yet the music in each also took Blue Note's modern jazz message in countless directions. To a fan, that variety can seem infinite.

Since its re-emergence in 1984, after its initial near-demise a few years earlier, Blue Note has gradually built a roster of new acts, including non-traditional jazz performers such as the jazz-hip-hop act Us3 and contemporary rap producer Madlib, along with funk-jazz jam bands from Soulive and Medeski Martin & Wood to the dance-minded saxophonist Karl Denson.

These are the kind of artists that make sticklers reared on the old guard cringe and worry about how Blue Note is maintaining its legacy. Jones and Van Morrison only add to the controversy.

"When you have a really major hit record like Norah Jones, two things happen," said London-based jazz critic Richard Cook, who wrote a history of the label Blue Note Records: The Biography, co-authored The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD and was also head of jazz for Polygram Records for six years in the mid-1990s. "One is that there is pressure on you to try and duplicate that success, either with the same artist or engaging other artists of a similar nature. That would be perhaps the more unfortunate side of it.

"But the rather more interesting side would be if the profits on that were somehow reinvested and used to pay for more hardcore jazz signings. And here too we've seen the situation where Blue Note has had success, big records like the Us3 record a few years ago and the Cassandra Wilson records of the early 1990s. You had the feeling that these were used to pay for the rest of the roster," Cook said.

Indeed, behind all the attention lavished upon Jones, Blue Note still has many artists pushing the boundaries of jazz from the experimentalism of French trumpeter Erik Truffaz to those reinventing the myriad nuances of traditional jazz (if such a thing exists), such as saxophonist Greg Osby, Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and even Jacky Terrasson, a pianist who favours old standards with an easily approachable style, a little like a young André Previn.

"That's a great jazz roster!" Lundvall said. "So I have no apologies to make whatsoever for having Al Green and Van Morrison and Norah Jones. I think it's great. I think it's also great that they sell enough records that we make a very substantial profit which will allow us to keep artists that lose money."

However, jazz as a genre continues to suffer, he added. "This music is incrisis when it comes to the marketplace. It's in absolute crisis."

To maintain its raison d'être as a jazz label, Lundvall insists on keeping musicians such as Osby or Terrasson on the label. "When you sign Jacky Terrasson after he wins the Monk competition [the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition in 1993], and you are up against Verve and Warner Bros. and Columbia -- all of whom wanted him -- you end up paying a premium because he's an artist everyone else wants. And now . . . the sales are not what they should be to make money, I'm not dropping him -- he and others, I don't want to make an example of him."

The lure of adding pop performers to pay the bills is common practice. Verve Records, for instance, has recent releases by R&B singer Aaron Neville, Natalie Cole, soul-jazz singer Lizz Wright and adult contemporary phenomenon Diana Krall. More than just helping to buttress the jazz business, they are changing the genre altogether.

"What in the world is happening with instrumental jazz?" pondered Billboard writer Dan Ouellette in a recent article in the music industry magazine. Vocalists have overwhelmed instrumental jazz sales, he wrote, "because vocals offer instant gratification, while instrumental music requires focus and a willingness to settle into the subtleties as well as the surprises."

Who's to say then that jazz -- a music that has always been about freedom and appropriating disparate ideas -- isn't evolving away from a purist's notion of the genre? Still the trouble is that the pressure to find the next Jones or Krall can distract the industry and lower its tolerance for taking on too many lower-selling acts.

"It's the kind of thing that's not confined to Blue Note. But because of the tremendous pressure of Norah Jones, Blue Note has to face up to this in perhaps a more specific way than perhaps some of their competitors have to do," Cook said.

"So my feeling overall is that in the short term, I'm quite glad to see any album with a Blue Note label on it succeed, because I think that, fundamentally, the spirit of the original label does endure there. Five years from now? It may be a different story. But at the moment, I remain optimistic," Cook said.

[Brian Olewnick]

For a moment, I thought Blue Note had signed Bill Dixon.

[MRS]

Originally posted by Nate Dorward
"What in the world is happening with instrumental jazz?" pondered Billboard writer Dan Ouellette in a recent article in the music industry magazine. Vocalists have overwhelmed instrumental jazz sales, he wrote, "because vocals offer instant gratification, while instrumental music requires focus and a willingness to settle into the subtleties as well as the surprises."

What?

[Jonny Miner]

For a moment, I thought Blue Note had signed Bill Dixon.

...That's exactly what I thought!

[Sergio Zamora]

Originally posted by Jonny Miner
...That's exactly what I thought!

Me too! Or at least that Blue Note was to issue some recently discovered Willie Dixon sides.

As for the article, I do think some folks are kinda hard on BN. I mean, yeah they're a corporation and their bottom line is profit, but if Al Green and Van Morrison help them keep jazz musicians on the roster (even if it's mostly jazz musicians I'm not particularly interested in), then good for them. Besides, it's Al Green and Van Morrison - it's not like they've turned MTV or something.

[Nick]

I'd take Norah Jones, Van Morrison, and Al Green over most of the jazz musicians currently signed to Blue Note.

[Bill Barton]

Originally posted by Brian Olewnick
For a moment, I thought Blue Note had signed Bill Dixon.

Now that would be news!

Part of the problem with Blue Note is the name. It hasn't been an independent jazz label for years now, but the name lingers on, and all of the history implied by the name. We still think of it as the brainchild of Francis Wolff and Alfred Lion, but it's basically a totally different company, and has been since a lot of Jazz Corner posters were in short pants.

At least it's not as totally insipid as it was in the mid-1970s when it was first gobbled up by the bean-counters.

Maybe they should change the name to "Pale Blue Note" or "Pastel Note."

[shrugs]

is Joe Lovano still with BN?

[Gary Sisco]

Oh for god sake, I thought it was Bill Dixon, too. I thought for a second I'd have to eat some crow about my commentary re the "new" Blue Note (a wholly owned subsidiary). I guess there's no way we'd live long enough to see them sign Bill.

Lovano is with BN as far as I know, yes, Shrugs.

[moneyp]

Funny, I was thinking, "Willie Dixon recorded for Blue Note?"

[mke]

I'm also in the Bill Dixon camp, but maybe only because I was listening to "Vade Mecum" in the second hand shop today.

[Nate Dorward]

Oh, crap, I'd just cut & pasted that quickly today without paying attention to the double entendre of the title. An amusing counterfactual if nothing else.

Yeah, Blue Note now is nothing to do with the old label at all. Hard to imagine the Impulse! of the 1960s releasing Diana Krall, either, for that matter.

[Captain Hate]

Originally posted by Brian Olewnick
For a moment, I thought Blue Note had signed Bill Dixon.

That's why I was here.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I still think it's funny to hear people complain about Norah Jones, whose demo contained several Jazz standards, can play Jazz and still does play Jazz, when Blue Note's roster is filled with smooth Jazz artists whose pablum would make most Jazz fans wretch. Just go to their web site and listen to a few random samples. There are some incredibly bad "Jazz" artists on that web site, and I ain't talkin' Joe Lovano & Greg Osby!

"Blue Note" ended when Lion & Wolff sold. Everything since then is a crap shoot. Some good, some bad and some ugly. Who am I to say that Norah Jones or Van Morrison is any worse than Paul Jackson, Alpha Blondy or (shudder) Najee?

Later,
Kevin

[Bill Barton]

Whoa! I guess that I'm really out of the loop here. Najee is actually on Blue Note now? Scary, scary s**t...!

"Pale Pink Note"?

At least they're still reissuing classics. Why those classics went out of print in the first place is a whole other story.

[Bill Barton]

Originally posted by Nate Dorward
Oh, crap, I'd just cut & pasted that quickly today without paying attention to the double entendre of the title. An amusing counterfactual if nothing else...

Just as long as we don't have any "melodic contrafacts."

[Nate Dorward]

Originally posted by Bill Barton
At least they're still reissuing classics. Why those classics went out of print in the first place is a whole other story.

Yes, this is why I refuse to produce "Top Ten Reissues of 200x" lists--why make a lot of hoopla about reissues of music that major labels shouldn't have let go o/p in the first place. (& then often destroy at whim anyway--witness the west-coast series they issued & immediately destroyed a few years back.)

[MRS]

[chuckyd4]

Since when is Alpha Blondy on Blue Note? Don't really care what stylistic camp he fits into, but I would have a problem with anybody putting him and Najee in the same breath. Haven't heard much of his new stuff, but I just might buy one if it came out on Blue Note.

I went with Bill Dixon when I clicked here too.







Apartheid is Nazism, baby...

[chuckyd4]

Crap, well I just checked the Blue Note site. Somehow I didn't realize those couple of Alpha Blondy albums were considered "Blue Note" albums. Do they have a world imprint or something? I think I have that "Live Au Zenith" sitting around in a corner of my collection somewhere.

[Pete C]

I may not be a Diana Krall fan, but I think she can be called a jazz singer and pianist, not an "adult contemporary phenomenon."

[Gary Sisco]

I'll keep buying BN's new issues of Greg Osby and Jason Moran, and, depending, Joe Lovano and Cassandra Wilson. Otherwise, I don't pay any attention at all to the label itself, anymore.

[Bill Barton]

Originally posted by chuckyd4
Since when is Alpha Blondy on Blue Note? Don't really care what stylistic camp he fits into, but I would have a problem with anybody putting him and Najee in the same breath. Haven't heard much of his new stuff, but I just might buy one if it came out on Blue Note.

I went with Bill Dixon when I clicked here too.







Apartheid is Nazism, baby...

Yeah, putting those two together in the same sentence (or even the same paragraph) is - shall we say - unsettling.

Perhaps the point was that neither one has anything to do with *jazz*?

"Cocody Rock" hits the D drive as I write this...

[Dr Dave]

Originally posted by mone peterson
Funny, I was thinking, "Willie Dixon recorded for Blue Note?"

Me, too.