Blue Note Records: A Singular Business Model

Abstract

IntroductionSome American brands are so iconic that their corporate marks are known around the world: think golden arches, mouse ears, or the bow tiebedecked bunnies, for example. Americans are known far and wide for our brands representing business and commerce, popular culture, and popular entertainment.We don't think of ourselves as exporters of art and culture, yet there is an American art export: jazz. represents our collective and community spirit, and our rugged individualism, our history of racism, and our history of believing in equal chances for all. There's harmony, a way of thinking about music that we owe to our Western European ancestors, as well as the panoply of instruments developed there. And there's rhythm, man is there ever rhythm, thanks to the descendants of slaves who brought a rhythmic vitality directly from the drums and syncopation of Africa. Borne of trials and tribulations, hate and love, fear and courage: is taking chances and figuring it out as you go along...jazz is America.But what is the logo of jazz? Well, aficionados from Warsaw to Perth will tell you: it's that black oval and long rectangle, a strangely deconstructed musical note nestled against the iconic words: BLUE NOTE. Blue Note is more than just a record label; it is music's Library of Congress, a compendium of music, album art, photography, and liner notes that document much of the history of jazz. is also one of the most enduring businesses in the recording industry.Appropriate to this American story, two of the founding figures of Blue Note were immigrants. Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff had become fast friends in the go-go days of the 1920s Weimar Germany, listening to jazz in the clubs and cabarets of Berlin, the center of in Europe at the time. According to Lion, quite by accident he had wandered into Berlin's Admiralspalast and heard Sam Wooding and His Chocolate Kiddies revue. He was hooked. It was the beat...It got in my bones! (Blue Note, film 2007). that moment on, he became obsessed with and swing; along with his friend Wolff, Lion sought out recordings and tried to catch as many touring acts as he could.Both Lion and Wolff were Jewish, and the rise of the Nazis forced them to flee Germany. They both landed permanently in New York City, Lion in 1937 and Wolff in 1939. In 1939, along with the support of American writer and musician Max Margulis, Lion started Blue Note Records. He was joined later that year by Wolff.Pre-War YearsJazz and swing music was the popular music of the day in the 1930s in the U.S., and New York was the center. was also home of the music industry with numerous recording studios, radio stations, and broadcast facilities, not to mention such celebrated venues as the Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall. was at Carnegie Hall, in a 1938 concert called From Spirituals to Swing, that Lion was said to have gotten the idea for a record label. Count Basie was performing, as were Big Joe Turner, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Albert Ammons, and Meade Lux Lewis, among others (Havens 2014, 42). was only a couple of weeks later that pianists Ammons and Lewis agreed to make the first recording on the label that Lion had only recently imagined. A 1939 flyer for the label includes the following, which serves as its mission statement to this day:Blue Note Records are designed simply to serve the uncompromising expression of hot and 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 audi- ence 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. (Havens 2014, 50)Clearly, from the beginning, this was a different kind of record label. …