"It must schwing!" was the motto of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, two German Jewish immigrants who in 1939 set up Blue Note Records, the jazz label that was home to such greats as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins. Blue Note, the most successful movie ever made about jazz, is a testimony to the passion and vision of these two men and certainly swings like the propulsive sounds that made their label so famous.
Ask mountain climbers about peaks, and they start with Everest. Ask jazz fans about record labels, and it's Blue Note. Founded in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, a pair of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Blue Note set an unmatched standard for consistent quality, innovation, and devotion to jazz.
There's nothing quite like that unmistakable Blue Note sound - crisp, solid, densely propulsive. Lion and Wolff recorded everything from trad and boogie-woogie to avant-garde, but its musical home was hard bop - jazz at its most muscularly swinging. "Even in the ballads," bassist Ron Carter says in the 1997 documentary "Blue Note: A Story of Modern Jazz," "there was some swing going on." (Or as Lion and Wolff would say in their accented English, "schwing.") There's also nothing quite like the look of Blue Note albums. Wolff was a gifted photographer, and the pictures he took of Blue Note recording sessions are classics. Art director Reid Miles did things with layout, typeface, and Wolff's photos that were every bit as innovative as the music.
Directed by Julian Benedikt, the film concentrates on the label's glory days, the '40s, '50s, and early '60s. (Lion and Wolff sold the company, which is still in operation, in 1965.) There's a wealth of archival footage - much of it jaw-droppingly good - from a wide range of sources, as well as numerous interviews with Blue Note artists and fans. An unexpected treat for jazz cognoscenti is getting to see Lorraine Gordon, Lion's first wife and the proprietor of the Village Vanguard, pick up a phone during an interview and take a reservation for that night's show.
DVD - 91 minutes - NTSC - ALL REGIONS - Worldwide Play |