Blue Note

The beginnings....

Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff were men of integrity and real jazz fans. Blue Note was a great label to record for. They gave a first break to a lot of great artists who are still out there doing it today. They gave me my first break. They gave a lot of musicians a chance to record when all the other companies weren’t interested. And they would stick with an artist, even if he wasn’t selling… If a guy was a great player who didn’t sell well - and there were many - and if Alfred and Frank believed in him, they would stay with him.

-Horace Silver in a 1980 interview with Michael Cuscuna

The great Chicago jazz artist Meade “Lux” Lewis was fond of the Minneapolis area, where his niece lived. He visited her as often as he could and for a stretch later in his career appeared annually at the White House Restaurant in Golden Valley, which was located only a few miles from where I live now.

Musicians performed in the White House’s Bamboo Room:

Incidentally, notice the reference to the Aqua Follies. This was a summer event inspired by the Billy Rose Aquacades at the 1937 Great Lakes Exposition in Cleveland, Ohio, and the 1939 World's Fair in New York. The Aqua Follies ended in 1964 but had a solid 26-year run, helping to develop Minnesota's image as a water sports paradise.

Here’s the inside of the Bamboo Room showing the grand piano where Lewis played:

The White House was the “Twin Cities’ premier food and entertainment center” and a popular spot on the 1960s jazz circuit. Here’s a Minneapolis Star ad for Les McCann from May 12, 1964:

Shortly after McCann’s gig, Meade “Lux” Lewis began a successful three-week engagement.

Around 2 a.m. on Sunday, June 7, Lewis left the White House parking. He was heading east on Olson Memorial Highway when his Chrysler Imperial was rear-ended by a vehicle traveling an estimated 80 mph. Lewis's car was pushed 400 feet and crashed into a tree. He was killed instantly. At 58 years old his career was tragically cut short. It had only been almost twenty-five years to the day, on January 6, 1939, in a studio on the West Side of Manhattan, since Lewis recorded a session with Alfred Lion that became the very first Blue Note record.

This week on that Big River called Jazz, we dig our paddles in and explore the early years of Blue Note Records.

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The legendary Blue Note label was founded in 1939 by Alfred Lion (born Löw), the son of a Berlin architect.

As a 16-year-old in 1926, Lion first heard live American jazz at a skating rink in Berlin. Performing that day was the now almost totally forgotten Sam Wooding and His Orchestra, also known as the Chocolate Kiddies, which included the now better-known trumpet player Tommy Ladnier. According to Michael Cuscuna in The Blue Note Label, hearing Sam Wooding’s orchestra changed Lion’s life:

He began to scour Berlin, with little success for recordings of unique American black music. There were few records and no sources of information about this phenomenon. His thirst for the music brought him to New York in 1928 where he worked on the docks and slept in Central Park to get closer to the music.

In 1931, during the Nazi party's rise to power, Lion and his mother emigrated to South America where he found odd jobs. Ultimately, he moved to the U.S. in the mid-1930s working with an import-export company.

One of record producer John Hammond’s best ideas, and he had many, was putting together the two From Spirituals To Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and 1939. These were historic events and included two of Hammond’s favorite musicians Meade “Lux” Lewis and Albert Ammons.

Here’s a program from the first concert:

In the audience that night was Alfred Lion and the beauty and soul of piano masters Lewis and Ammons gave him the idea to pursue his dream of starting a record company.

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Ever since 1928 when Hammond first heard Clarence “Pinetop” Smith’s original boogie-woogie piano, he was fascinated by it. So in 1931 when he heard a recording of Honky Tonk Train Blues by Meade “Lux” Lewis, he found, as he called Lewis, “the ultimate practitioner.” However, according to Hammond in his autobiography On Record, “…no matter where I looked, or whom I asked, I couldn’t find him.”

He likely heard Lewis’ first solo record in 1927 on the Paramount label, which became a jazz classic:

Hammond went on to tell about how he eventually found Lewis:

Now years later in Chicago, I raised the question again while chewing the fat with Albert Ammons. “Meade Lux?” said Albert. “Why sure. He’s working in a car wash around the corner.” And so he was!

That fall Hammond brought Lewis to New York City for a concert and an engagement at Nick’s, a dixieland spot in the village. But Lewis soon went back to Chicago. However, Hammond didn’t give up on him and seven years later he was playing at the From Spirituals to Swing concert.

According to Peter J. Silvester’s A Left Hand Like God: A history of boogie-woogie piano, Lewis became friends with Albert Ammons during childhood. They went to the same school together briefly, and they practiced and learned the piano together on the Ammons’ family piano. At 17, Ammons and his friend Lewis both drove for Chicago’s Silver Taxicab Company.

By 1934 Ammons was leading his own small group at the Club De Lisa on the South Side of Chicago. After recording Boogie Woogie Stomp with His Rhythm Kings for Decca in 1936, Ammons became strongly identified with the boogie-woogie style:

Shortly after this recording, Ammons moved to New York and gigged regularly with Lewis, Kansas City pianist Pete Johnson, and blues singer Big Joe Turner at the Café Society at 2 Sheridan Square in downtown New York City.

According to owner Barney Josephson, the Café Society was “a club like no other”. The club really was like no other in that there was no color barrier; blacks and whites were welcome and treated as equals. The greeting at the door was: “Welcome to Café Society, the wrong place for the right people.”

About five days after the December 23, 1938, From Spirituals To Swing concert, Alfred Lion went to the Café Society with the sole purpose of getting Lewis and Ammons to record for his new, and as of yet unnamed, record label. After their initial surprise, the piano players had just one simple question: Would they get paid? Of course he’d pay them, and pay them well. The deal was done.

On January 6, 1939, Lion met Lewis and Ammons at a location thought to be WMGM, a radio station on the West Side of Manhattan.

Beginning at two in the afternoon, the two pianists completed 19 takes. After listening to the discs at his apartment, Lion was convinced that this music deserved to be more widely heard. According to Lion, “I decided to make some pressings and go into the music business.”

On March 3, 1939, the first two 12” 78 rpm Blue Note records were released. The first, two slow blues tunes Melancholy and Solitude performed by Lewis:

The second, two quicker tempo tunes Boogie Woogie Stomp and Boogie Woogie Blues performed by Ammons:

With no real distribution in place, Lion offered these records by mail order at $1.50 each, double the standard retail price for a 10” 78 rpm record. Lion pressed just twenty-five of each disc – hardly an ambitious release debut.

Years later, Alfred Lion would recall the huge challenge Blue Note faced: “There was nothing in ’39. No [music trade] books where you could check out things. Nothing. You had to go by your wits.” However, through his friendship with Milt Gabler, another jazz aficionado and owner of the Commodore Music Shop, Lion was able to sell his Blue Note records.

In those lean, early years, and during WWII Gabler offered essential help with distribution and sales venues. He also received financial help from his decidedly more benevolent co-founders Max Margulis, a Marxist vocal coach, and the critic Emanuel Eisenberg. Eisenberg was also a contributor to the “New Masses,” an American Marxist magazine that incidentally had also agreed to underwrite Hammond’s talent search and Carnegie Hall production for From Spirituals to Swing.

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Now that Alfred Lion had a record label, in 1939 he wrote Blue Note Records’ Statement of Purpose:

Blue Note Records are designed simply to serve the uncompromising expressions of hot jazz or swing, in general. Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression. By virtue of its significance in place, time and circumstance, it possesses its own tradition, artistic standards and audience that keeps it alive. Hot jazz, therefore, is expression and communication, a musical and social manifestation, and Blue Note records are concerned with identifying its impulse, not its sensational and commercial adornments.

The first recording session after the official launch of the record company took place on April 7, 1939. The session included the Frank Newton Quintet and J. C. Higginbotham Quintet, which Lion called the Port of Harlem Jazzmen. They recorded again on June 8, 1939. From that session, here is After Hour Blues:

The Port of Harlem Jazzmen also added Sidney Bechet and became the Port of Harlem Seven and recorded Blues for Tommy:

The song is dedicated to Tommy Ladnier, who had tragically died of a heart attack four days earlier. He was only 39 years old.

Recorded at the same session as Blues for Tommy, the Sidney Bechet Quintet recorded Blue Note’s first big hit, George Gershwin’s Summertime:

At the end of 1939, Lion’s boyhood friend Francis Wolff left Nazi Germany and came to America. He found employment at Milt Gabler’s music store and joined Lion as his photographer. When Lion was drafted into the war in mid-1942, he and Wolff stopped all recording and suspended operations for the duration of the war. After WWII began, Margulis and Eisenberg moved on to other projects. However, it was the Lion and Wolff partnership that went on to define for many years to come that legendary Blue Note sound and look. Blue Note’s next recording session was not until November 1943 and the rest is history.

Here’s one more for the road. One of the best and often least remembered 1930s guitarists is Teddy Bunn. He performed with pretty much everybody in the 1930s and 1940s. He was also present at Blue Note’s first small group recording on April 7, 1939. Later, at a 1940 solo session, he recorded the classic Blues Without Words, an improvised guitar and vocal solo:

True to their original Statement of Purpose, throughout the years Blue Note Records stayed dedicated to uncompromising expressions without sensational and commercial adornments - a purpose that served them well. What an incredible journey they had - one of the finest in jazz since 1939.

Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig in our paddles to explore the world of American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax.

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