Lion and Wolff were “more like jazz musicians than record producers,” according to vibist Bobby Hutcherson, an early Blue Note artist. “They loved to hang out and have a good time.” They also had a feel for the players. They scheduled recording sessions for 4:30 in the morning after the clubs closed in order to get that intimate, bluesy, after-hours feel that they sought to capture on vinyl. And, unlike other independent jazz labels of the day, they actually paid musicians to rehearse. “The difference between Blue Note and every other jazz label,” the old saying went, “is two days’ rehearsals.”
Frank Wolff had been a commercial photographer in Berlin, and in New York he began documenting Blue Note recording sessions. Moving unobtrusively through the darkened studio, Wolff captured thirty years’ worth of intimate portraits of jazz artists creating their music. In 1953, Lion and Wolff hooked up with recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, an odd-duck audio goof who had built a recording studio in his parents’ Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, living room and always put on white gloves before he touched a microphone. Together, Lion, Wolff, and Van Gelder created what record producer and Blue Note historian Michael Cuscuna calls “a warm, clear, big sound that would forever redefine the way jazz was heard.”
With the invention of first the ten-inch then the twelve-inch long-playing record in the early 1950s came the opportunity to create great album art. In 1956, Blue Note discovered a young designer, a classical-music lover named Reid Miles, working in the art department at Esquire magazine. For the next eleven years, Miles, working with Wolff’s black-and-white photos, designed more than five hundred severely geometrical, radically simple, two-or three-color, no-budget album covers that indelibly shaped the look of the 1950s.
Though nothing the company ever released sold more than five thousand copies, Blue Note put out some of the coolest records ever made, including John Coltrane’s Blue Trane, Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else, Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder, Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, and Jackie McLean’s Destination Out!, to name just a very few. Nothing they did, however, mattered more than recording the work of Thelonious Monk.
Alfred Lion had been inspired to start a record label by the boogie-woogie piano playing of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis at the famed 1938 “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall. Accordingly, Blue Note in its early years was dedicated to swing music. The label’s earliest releases were all-star sessions featuring great traditional players like soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, who gave Blue Note its first bona fide hit with a cover of “Summertime.” During the war years, Blue Note had a string of minor successes with blues honker Ike Quebec, but by ’46, Lion and Wolff had begun to realize that something new was happening in jazz. They decided to take a year off from recording just to listen.
When Ike Quebec turned Lion on to Thelonious Monk, Lion, in his own words, “keeled over” with excitement. Blue Note brought Monk into the studio in October and November 1947 and recorded everything that he had composed up to that time: fourteen sides—a then unheard-of number for the indie jazz world—including much of the music we know him by today. Issued on 78 RPM records between 1947 and 1952, and currently available as The Best of Thelonious Monk: The Blue Note Years, Monk’s first recordings under his own name add up to less than ninety minutes of music. Nevertheless, it was, and remains, the ur-shit, the root of all jazz art that followed, filled with silences as resonant as the notes that created them, an art of implication, which is the very architecture of cool.
As heavily as Bird’s departure must have weighed on Dizzy Gillespie, the defection of Kenny Clarke, his close friend and drummer, must have been worse. For a decade, Gillespie had relied on Clarke’s timekeeping and sense of rhythm. But terminally sick of American racism, Clarke, one of the few beboppers to see World War II combat, decided to stay in the Paris he’d just helped liberate. When the war ended, he applied immediately for French citizenship, and he was soon directing his own hugely popular band. Deprived of rhythm support, Diz had to reconsider his place in music. “It’s funny,” Gillespie would muse later in his life, “but I don’t consider myself a blues man. Blues is my music, the music of my people, but I’m not what you call a blues player.” After Clarke’s departure, he remembered, “I worked on developing modern jazz of a different kind.”
As a teenager brand-new to New York, Gillespie had gotten to know the Cuban trumpet player Mario Bauza, who was the musical director of Cab Calloway’s band. It was Bauza who called in sick one night so that Dizzy could sit in and be heard for the first time by Calloway. With Calloway, Dizzy was playing a watered-down version of Latin music, but, as he wrote in To Be or Not to Bop, “I’ve always had that Latin feeling.”
The “Latin feeling” that swept New York in the 1940s was the result of both the 1917 Jones Act, which granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship; and World War II, which cut the United States off from Europe, encouraging closer ties with Latin America. Between 1917 and 1955 the Hispanic community in New York grew from less than a thousand Cubans and Puerto Ricans to 450,000 Puerto Ricans alone. Every midnight flight from San Juan and Havana that touched down at La Guardia or Idlewild Airport (which opened in 1948) brought Nueva York more Creole culture with its drums.
Puerto Rican bandleader Noro Morales, a particular favorite of Walter Winchell, the famed and feared Broadway gossip columnist of the New York Daily Mirror, starred at the Stork Club and the Copacabana; but until Frankie “Macho” (his manager eventually convinced him to soften his nickname to “Machito”) Grillo came along in the early 1940s, most successful Latin bandleaders in the United States were on the order of Xavier Cugat, the former Los Angeles Times editorial cartoonist who’d become—thanks to a string of movie appearances—a wildly popular bandleader specializing in polite dance music played by musicians of Spanish descent. The only Cuban drums that had insinuated their way into the music were high-pitched little bongos. The groin-high congas, with their booming evocations of Africa, were considered too primitive for American popular music, too black. But in 1940, when Bauza left Cab Calloway to become musical director for Machito, that began to change.
When they took the stage at La Conga at Fifty-second and Broadway in the summer of 1943, Machito’s Afro-Cubans with Mario Bauza became the first black Latin band to play a midtown club. The Afro-Cubans, in fact, served as La Conga’s house band for four years, and their live-at-midnight broadcasts from the club were heard from coast to coast. The Afro-Cubans had their first hit in 1944 with their theme song, “Tanga.” Tanga was Afro-Cuban slang for pot.