“Blue Note Records” has changed the way Jazz was founded by two Berliners, who escaped from Hitler in the United States. Now a Film about her story, the Home, and quite a lot of Jazz in the cinema starts.
Thelonious Monk 1961
On a summer trip to Swinemünde, Alfred Löw hears for the first time Dixieland. That was the beginning of the 1920s. He will call the listening experience later, “the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Jazz”. The advertising photographer Frank Wolff, hear the impressive Jazz in Berlin’s admiralspalast: Sam Wooding and his orchestra. The two live in Berlin. They are friends and share the love for Jazz.
As Loew’s 1926 travels professionally to New York, it is not easy to come to Jazz records. Jazz playing at that time, predominantly African-American musicians. As “Race records” defamed, Löw buy the longed-for Jazz records in Harlem.
Alfred Lion is in front of his escape from Nazi Germany, “Löw”
The Jewish Faith of the two Berlin makes it to them after 1933 increasingly difficult to live in national socialist Germany. Löw moved first to America and – with the Passion for Jazz in the Luggage.
What disturbs him to the Jazz records of this time: Jazz to listen for only three minutes at a time. Long-playing records is a privilege of classical music. So the idea to start an own Label and to give jazz musicians more room, so he told in a radio interview in 1964.
Frank Wolff does not succeed in 1939 to escape to New York on one of the last of the secret police, the Gestapo-controlled ships. In New York, the German emigrants will meet again, call Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, and with “Blue Note Records” your Hobby into a career. The characteristic “blue notes” of Jazz and Blues-derived name of the company is program.
On the first panel of 1939, the Boogie-Woogie playing pianist Meade “Lux” Lewis (pictured) and Albert Ammons
Discriminated Against The Founding Fathers
Possible that the German Jews, Lion and Wolff have their own discrimination by the Nazis in front of eyes as they are the oppressed minority of black musicians adopt in the US especially and give them a professional Forum. Lion and Wolff to pay not only the recordings, but also the hours of Practice. For the time was outrageous.
“Moreover, to photograph the African-American musicians for their record covers, and treated them as artist eye-to-eye and proved to be so as an early supporter of the American civil rights movement,” says Wim Wenders as the Executive Producer responsible for the Film, “It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story” is responsible about Lion and Wolff.
The Director in this homage to the two fanatical jazz lovers of the German-Australian Journalist Eric Friedler. The multi-award-winning documentarist already treated topics such as the genocide of the Armenians and the Argentine military dictatorship, and illuminated the life of the powerful GDR politician, Erich Honecker, and the Israeli peace activist Abie Nathan.
Eric Friedler, the film’s Director of “It Must Schwing!”
Lion is happy in the beginning, on the order of 30 plates of his first customers, with soprano saxophonist and clarinetist Sidney Bechet, one of the most important soloists of early Jazz, the first commercial success of the label. Soon-to-be “Blue Note Records” the most jazz musicians in the country announced the Jack in the Hand: Star-Pianist Thelonius Monk, for example, which can be heard on one of the first shots together with drum legend Art Blakey. In the Film, some of these Meetings in black-and-white animations of fiction are represented functionalized.
“It must schwing!”
Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff put together after the end of the Second world war for “Blue Note Records” a brilliant Team: tenor saxophonist Ike Quebec as a talent scout with engineer legend Rudy van Gelder and the two founding fathers, the Basis for an iconic Jazz Label. Van Gelder comes in the movie. He gave a few weeks before his death in 2016, Director Friedler to be his last Interview.
Francis developed his photographs and the ideas of the graphic designer Reid Miles to Cover the unique Look of the “Blue Note”-panels. Their secret Motto and the title of the new film a quip by Alfred Lion, due to his German accent, was: “It must schwing!”
“Somethin’ Else” with a simple Cover Design of the “Blue Note” is one of the most famous Jazz records ever
The official Slogan of “Blue Note Records” but is now sober for what is heard: “The Finest In Jazz Since 1939”. The stylistic range of the record company is growing fast – of the Hard-Bob-beginnings to the modern and trendy Bebop, as the trumpet legend Miles Davis is playing.
Meeting of the Great
Also the forefathers of the Modern Jazz such as Oscar-award winner Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and John Coltrane, saxophone classics, Charlie “Bird” Parker and many other Jazz greats, are inseparable, with “Blue Note Records”. In the 1950s and 1960s the company experienced its heyday. In 1967, finally, Lion and Wolff to sell their Label to the competitors, “Liberty Records”. “United Artists” assumes, sold it later to the “EMI-Capitol”. In 1979, the end of “the Blue Note”, as the “Capitol” of the big names into his own Repertoire.
Only six years later on Blue Note was founded as a Sublabel of “Capitol”. Artistically, the small Label is the moving story new, discovered about the American Soul and jazz singer Norah Jones.
Musical Realignment
In the Wake of the global success story of the daughter of Sitar Virtuoso Ravi Shankar changed the Oeuvre of the venerable record company. Henceforth, also Country – and Roots-music to be won is no longer taboo: in addition to soul musicians like Al Green and Van Morrison and Country veteran Willie Nelson to the great artists of the label.
“It’s the best movie about Jazz that I have ever seen,” says singer Sheila Jordan on “It Must Schwing!”
Audible pride claimed Lion and Wolff in 1964, in the radio interview, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, and Andrew Hill to have discovered, before they were famous. Also today, the new “Blue Note remains” a special class for:
The American Singer/Songwriter Amos Lee will find its way into the international music business on “the Blue Note”. And his colleague Priscilla Ahn is being courted by many record companies, but he writes, finally, full of Pride – “Blue Note”.
International Artist Line-Up
In the meantime, the Label, “Universal Music”, the most successful record company in the world. And since the Blue Note is now not only for American artists: the still small and still very fine Label, the Singer now find themselves-songwriter Keren Ann with her Dutch and Israeli roots. Or Chano Domínguez from Spain, the inventor of the Flamenco-Jazz.
And many other outstanding musicians and “Blue Note” of their own styles as musicians from Germany: The Entertainer Götz Alsmann has released several albums with his jazz songs, pop songs and Chansons in the “Blue Note”. This may come as a surprise to real jazz lovers. But for the 75 years ago by German immigrants in the United States based Jazz Label, a circle is closing. In the coming year Blue Note Records celebrates its 80-year-old.